Speedsterized
by KF fan
Summary: Wally West is a skinny 6th grader at the top of his class, dealing with bullies and his crazy family when he gets invited to meet the Flash courtesy of his Uncle Barry in Keystone City. That's when things get really complicated.
1. Chapter 1

"Mr. West!" the sixth grade science teacher fumed and spun around to face the class.

Chan, beside him at the back of the room, had to hold one hand over his face to stifle laughter. Wally already had on his blue eyed good boy expression but it was too late. She'd already guessed that it was he who'd made the joke. Didn't matter. It was worth it. The class still reverberated with laughter.

The teacher glanced around the room, silencing the lingering chuckles from the rest of the class. "Mr. West, you're going to have to-"

BRRRINNNGGG! BRRRINNNGGG!

The teacher shuffled over to the phone beside the chalkboard still scowling at Wally.

"Hello . . . yes . . . "she looked down and then right at Wally again. ". . . right n- . . . yes . . . all-allright . . . 237? . . . Okay, I will."

She hung up. "Mr. West. Come here," she motioned to a spot beside the lab table behind which she stood. "And bring your books."

Wally got up from his chair, pushed a hand down into each of his back pockets to adjust his pants and then made his way to the front of the class with everyone watching. The teacher was scribbling on a yellow pad of paper. She tore off the top sheet and handed it to him.

"Go to this room. They want you there. I can't say the same here."

The class chuckled and Wally shuffled out into the hallway. The yellow hall pass said to go to Mr. Gromek in room 237.

Gromek? Who's that?

And, wait a minute. 237? Don't the rooms only go up to 232?

Wally walked calmly down the hall and then jogged easily up the stairs. Hmmph. It wasn't only good timing for her. She was really mad this time. Might've been a detention or more in it this time. That was good timing all around, that phone call.

He started down the hall on that wing of Jump City Junior High, glancing at the numbers on the doors, having to almost look around the corner to see some of the numbers on the rooms with open doors. In one room, an eighth grade boy much bigger than 4 foot 11 inch tall Wally and seated next to the door saw him and made a motion with one finger across his throat.

"Wait'll I get you, sixth grader bitch."

"Yeah, wait'll you learn to read," responded Wally and added, "Guess we've both got a long wait coming, huh?" He hurried away down the hall.

230 . . 231 . . 232. Wally stopped and stared down the hallway. He was right. The classrooms only went up to 232.

But then he remembered the 'hallway to nowhere' as he and his friends called it. Off to the side at the top of one of the main stairways was a dimly lit hallway that nobody ever seemed to head towards. Wally ambled over and saw a closely packed series of doors starting with 233. These couldn't be classrooms. They were too small. And the danger zones, the principal's office and, even worse, the vice principal's office were a floor down and back toward the middle of the building. So that wasn't what this was about. Pffew!

He looked at the name on his hall pass, again. Gromek. He knocked on the door.

"Come in," said a man's voice from inside.

Wally entered and closed the door behind himself. "Mr. . . Gromek? I'm Wally West. Mrs. Tanner told me to-"

"Yes, I know," he said with a smile. He was a big man, more in weight then height and middle aged. They all seemed pretty much the same age to Wally. This guy wore a typically bad teacher's suit. He sat back down behind a desk that seemed to take up half the space of the small bookcase lined room.

"Have a seat, Wallace," he said gesturing to the chair in front of the desk. Wally sat down and was immediately conscious that his seat was distinctly lower than this Gromek guy's chair. Sixth grade boys were especially conscious of such things.

"Wally," he belatedly corrected.

"Hmm?" said the man looking up from a file folder that was now monopolizing his attention.

"I said 'Wally'. I always go by 'Wally' not 'Wallace' or 'Wallace Rudolf' or-or 'Wallace Rudolf West'. Those only get used when somebody's mad at me. Did I . . did I do something wrong?"

"Nooooooo! Not at all . . Wally. We're . . looking out for you."

The man was so friendly it was a bit creepy. Wally only half caught his last words. "Huh?"

The man ignored it. His attention was on the file in front of him, again, as he flipped through the sheets within it for a few seconds.

"Do-do kids make fun of you for your hair?" he asked without looking up at said hair or even pausing in leafing through the file.

Wally shrugged. "Not much any more."

"But they used to?" the heavy man asked, still pawing through the file.

Wally shrugged again. "They did a lot when I first moved here from Blue Valley."

Still the man worked through the file and didn't look up. "I don't know if I've ever seen hair so . . orange as yours."

Wally just grunted.

"Ah, here it is," said the man with a smile of satisfaction. "Blue Valley, you say, where is that?"

"It's outside Keystone City . . . where the Flash patrols."

The man wrote something in the file but to Wally's chagrin, he didn't get to tell the man that he, Wally West, was going to meet the Flash.

"So . . Wally. You're probably wondering why you're here?"

"Um . . yeah. Look, if it's about Mrs. Tanner's science class, well, I didn't really mean that thing about the Vice Principal. It's probably anatomically impossible even for him. If-if the class just went a little faster I wouldn't-"

"This isn't about science class . . Wally."

"English?"

"Noooo, Wally, it's not about any specific class."

Wally realized he'd been leaning anxiously forward in his chair and consciously leaned back to reassert how cool and calm he was.

"No," Mr. Gromek continued. "Ms. Glickstein and I are just very . . interested in your answers to the bullying survey everyone filled out last month."

Wally made a face. That stupid thing? 20 minutes of wasted time filling in ovals with pencils at the end of Prune Face's english class.

"You see, there were three distinct components to it, if you remember, Wally, and all your teachers say you have a terrific memory. There were questions related to whether or not students had experienced any aspect of bullying in the last year and there were a series of questions relating to students' home lives and their general . . frame of mind."

Wally made a face. Is . . . this guy a-a school shrink?

"Your reponses . . intrigued both Ms. Glickstein and I more than just about any other student's."

Wally sighed openly. Stupid! Stupid! Stupid! Should never have answered all those questions honestly! It was so obvious what they were looking for. He ground his teeth at how dumb he'd been to believe them.

Confidential!

Anonymous!

Be honest!

How could I be so dumb as to trust teachers?

"So, we did quite a bit of checking on you, um, Wally. You see it's not only our job to try to head off the atmosphere at Jump City Junior High becoming hostile for any of our students but also to be proactive in addressing the needs of those students away from school."

He gave Wally a big smile.

So. Creepy.

He was, apparently, expecting Wally to ask some sort of question. But Wally was only trying to figure out what he should do and said nothing.

"Uh, yes," the fat man retreated into the file. "Your-your responses to our behavioral assessment array of questions gave the clearest indicators of the prevalence of a culture of bullying of any student's profile and the first half of your home assessment array was stunning in the bleak chances for emotional self-actualization depicted. Yet your answers to the second half of your home assessment array, concerning your . . frame of mind, were completely at odds with that."

Wally quietly groaned.

The man sighed and went back to the file. "First, do we have this right? Your best friend is . . Lee Chan? And you're also friends with . . Aaron Glass, Steven Kellner and . . Jeff St. Pierre?

Wally nodded. Chan, Aaron, Stevie and Jeff.

The man continued and asked Wally to confirm the names of his parents and sister and their address. Wally nodded to all of them.

"Interestingly, we cross-checked your responses to the school behavioral assessment with those of your friends and found that they all seemed to mention a portion of the incidents that you did, though all had more positive home assessment responses than you did. Do . . do you think that you and the other ner-the other . . intellectual boys in your class get picked on quite a bit?"

Wally shrugged. He was now filled with a deep suspicion that this guy was going to express a lot of pity for him. Poor boy Wally. Bullied Wally. Ugh!

"Don't be afraid," the man gave what he probably thought was a smile of great sympathy.

Wally suddenly remembered that word they'd learned in english class last week. Unctuous.

"We're here to help you, Wally. What you say won't go any farther than this room."

"I didn't think answering those questions was going to go this far!"

"Wally!" the man softly reproached him.

Wally just stared back not sure what to make of this. Why was it wrong for him to point that out?

"Nothing you say will leave this room, Wally."

"Unless that file does."

"Well, the file is only for Ms. Glickstein and me."

"What's the . . the point of this, again?"

The man was offended that Wally wasn't immediately accepting him as his friend. "I want to help you, Wally! Tell me about the bullying that you've suffered."

"It's hardly anything."

"Hardly . . !" The man gasped in lieu of continuing then gulped and went on. "Your assessment listed . . three apparent fights, two incidents of being locked in hallway lockers, one of those upside down, a . . swirly . . whatever that is, an atomic wedgie and enough other indicia of bullying to certainly constitute a hostile atmosphere."

Wally gritted his teeth.

Never.

Should've.

Said.

Anything!

Oh, don't worry. This will all be anonymous and confidential. It's only for a national survey. He shook his head slightly thinking of how dumb he'd been.

"You were-you were also in the center of that incident last Friday involving a boy named . . ," back to the file for a moment, "Freddie Simmons, weren't you?"

"Yeah."

"Tell me about it."

"Not much to tell. A bunch of those same stupid eighth graders who pick on Chan and me and the others were going to beat up Freddie Simmons."

"Why was that?"

Wally sighed. "Oh, I don't know. Because they're idiots. And, it probably had something to do with it being one of those culture Fridays and the culture thing presented to us being a ballet . . recital or performance or whatever they call it and Freddie being maybe the only boy in school who takes ballet classes."

"Oh, so it wasn't at all you who was being bullied. You were . . protecting your friend?" he said as he wrote in the file.

"I kept him from getting hurt worse, if that's what you mean. Maybe he got that perfect beating."

"That . . perfect beating?" Furious scribbling in the file.

"Yeah, the kind that doesn't get him hurt too bad but makes him realize that he's gotta be able to protect himself and inspires him to do something about it."

"But why does he need to do it all himself."

"Because he can't rely on you."

"What do you mean?" Gromek complained, all offended again.

"I mean, no matter what you do you can't stop it. All you can do is make it happen somewhere else. If you really wanted to do something. You'd send everybody to karate class."

"That's how we should stop bullying, teach everyone to fight?" asked Gromek with a hint of condescension.

"Or give us all knives," said Wally just to annoy him. "Big blades like you could gut a deer with," he added with a hopeful nod.

To Wally's surprise, the man stopped the budding argument there and just gave a small sigh. "So . . what, exactly, is a . . ," he checked the file, "'swirly', Wally?"

Wally rolled his eyes. "It's when some stupid, mouth-breathing eighth graders jump you and your friends and they hold you upside down in the air so that your head's in a toilet bowl as they flush it over and over."

"Oh. So that's what that's called? And how did that make you feel, Wally?"

"What?"

"How did that make you feel?"

Wally squinted at him. What the f-?

" . . . Angry, of course."

"And . . when they gave you an atomic wedgie?"

Wally sighed and made a face. Is he gonna go over every single thing?

"What about when-"

"I was angry then, too."

"At who?"

"Whom."

"Huh?"

"At whom. You need an object pronoun. Whom, not who."

"That's-that's right, Wally. I saw in your file that you've done very well in Mrs. Cadwallader's english class. She seems quite taken with you. So-"

"Are these questions gonna go a little faster than this . . Sir?"

The man seemed flustered but didn't lose his cool. "Wally, I'm just trying to . . to get a sense of how all of this is affecting you. Ms. Glickstein and I were both struck by all the bullying you seem to have endured and how . . . emotionally sparse the home life you depict in your assessment answers is and then how paradoxically . . content your personal assessment answers portray you. It doesn't seem to fit."

"Why not, sir?"

"Wally, you're an average size boy for your age, skinnier than most, I suppose. Should you have to fight boys much bigger than you?"

"No."

"Doesn't that bother you?"

"Sure, but . . so what?"

"Hmm." He went back into the file folder, furiously flipping pages. "You filled in the oval that says your parents give you encouragement . . . never. Is that really true, Wally?"

Wally shrugged.

"Is it?"

"The last oval before that was once a month. It's been longer than that, so I filled in the 'never' oval."

"And that doesn't bother you?"

Wally shrugged.

"Wally!" Gromek pressed. "That's not good. And," he looked down at the file again, "when asked how often your parents said they love you, you said 'never'."

"Well, the last oval before that was once a month, too. So I'm in the 'never' oval."

Gromek gave him a pained look of sympathy that Wally found almost painful to be the recipient of. He had to stop this right away. Right now. He was not going to be Wally West, object of pity. Uh uh. Not him.

"What? I spend more time with Chan and my other friends and my Aunt Iris, Iris West looks after me, too."

"Iris West?" The man's eyebrows went up. "The-the writer, the reporter?"

Wally nodded. The guy's expression had totally changed. He sat up in his chair, his expression now interested not pitying.

"Wow, I saw her on cable news the other night. She tore that treasury department guy a new one. She's your aunt?"

Wally nodded proudly. "She's great." He pressed on, seeing that the guy had lost his train of thought.

"Would you like to meet her the next time she's in Jump?"

It was funny for Wally to watch him try to rein in his interest.

"Oh . . . if it's not too much-"

In the hallway outside, the bells rang marking the end of that class period. Wally jumped up and was immediately at the door.

"Not so fast, young man. I . . I want to talk to you again. We'll . . we'll be keeping an eye on you. So-"

"Yes sir!" chirped Wally before hurrying out the door.

He jumped down the last 10 of the steps in the stairway to the lower level in one jump and hurried down the hall to meet Chan and the others outside Mrs. Tanner's room, saying a 'Thank you, Aunt Iris!' to himself as jogged down the hallway.

An older teacher called to him from a doorway. "No running in the hallways, young man!"

"Yes, ma'am," said Wally as he passed her without slowing down and eventually sidled up to his pals.

"Hey, what was that all about?" asked Chan when he caught up to them, his interest seconded by glances from Aaron, Jeff and Stevie.

"Nuthin," smirked Wally. "Guy just wanted to ask me about my Aunt Iris. Just a celebrity hound. And it got me away from Tanner just in time!"

Chan laughed, "You're so lucky. She was just about to slam you with a detention!"

Wally smirked, "Not a chance!"

The others laughed at his certainty and they continued on to their lockers and then off to their last class. After that was over, they gathered their books and backpacks, checked for the presence of jerk 8th graders and, seeing none, started home. They had a standing invitation from Aaron's mom for a ride but they preferred to walk as long as they weren't going to get beat up or stuffed in trash cans or something.

The five of them were all among the smartest boys in the 6th grade but none were exactly fearsome fighters. Aaron was a little shorter than average. Wally, Chan and Jeff were just a little taller than average. Stevie was the tallest of them all by a couple inches. Wally and Chan were both very slender. Jeff and Aaron had average builds. Stevie was charitably described as stocky. Wally had bright red, actually orange hair. Chan's was black, Aaron's and Jeff's brown. Stevie was blond.

They'd been together as a group, since Wally's family had moved to Jump City five years ago. They were called the 'nerd mafia' by the 8th grade boys who tormented them and by some of the other 6th graders. The five of them never referred to their group that way. And though they were definitely a sort of a team, there were deeper friendships within the group. Wally and Chan were best friends. Aaron had been best friends with Jeff, then Stevie, now in 6th grade it was hard to tell which. But they were all good friends and they did as much as possible together. If you found one over at the home of another you were likely to find three more.

"You guys see that new clip of Batman and Robin?" asked Jeff as he threw an acorn down the street.

"The one at the bank?" asked Chan

Jeff nodded. It'd gone viral. Bedouins in caves had seen it by now.

Wally made a disapproving face. "Kind of went overboard, didn't they?"

Chan nodded. Aaron gave a glance of agreement. Stevie shook his head. The others stared at him in disbelief.

"What?" Stevie complained.

Wally just shook his head.

"Jesus, Wally, the guy wasn't out."

"Practically," objected Chan.

"You always agree with him," laughed Jeff to Chan nodding at Wally.

"A referee would've been counting the last few seconds of a knockout if that'd been a boxing match," said Chan as he grabbed an acorn off the ground and tried to throw it as far as Jeff had.

"Little douche freaking jumped on the guy from like 15 feet up, however high up that power line was he spun around," Wally noted.

"That was a pretty cool move, carrot top. Ya gotta admit that," said Stevie taking his turn at throwing acorns.

Wally nodded reluctantly as did Chan. But Wally made another face. "He-he acts like he's mister badass but he's probably smaller than any of us. And that uniform . . . my god!"

The other boys laughed agreement.

"I mean, a green speedo and bare legs and, what are those, elf shoes?"

"Gay thought!" shouted Stevie.

"What?" complained Wally.

"Green speedo?"

"What? That's what it looks like he wears?"

"You noticed a guy's underwear?"

"Um, when they wear it on the outside I do. Superman wears, what, red underpants on the outside am I not supposed to notice that either?"

"I suppose," Stevie let him off the hook.

"Doesn't he just seem like a complete little jerk, asshole, Robin I mean?" asked Chan.

The others nodded.

"There's something wrong with both him and Batman," suggested Jeff. "Seriously. Even in Gotham City where they work, people don't really like 'em. We've got family there and they say that everybody sort of likes that Batman and Robin are there fighting crooks but that nobody actually likes either of 'em."

"Yeah, but it works," said Stevie now throwing a crab apple and hitting a mail box on the corner with a satisfying thud inspiring the other four to all grab crab apples off the ground and bean that same mail box. "The whole total badass thing is what they bring to the table," said Stevie.

Wally picked up an acorn as they all approached a street corner. All five dodged behind the mail box to be sure those 8th graders weren't waiting for them. Seeing that the coast was still clear they started walking five abreast again. Wally threw his acorn. It went further than Jeff's, Stevie's or Chan's had.

"I'll give you that," he said to Stevie. "They're not as lame as Green Arrow. What's he got? How is he even in the Justice League?"

"What about Green Lantern?" laughed Jeff. "The-the guy's power is jewelry. And where's the freakin' lantern? He's got a ring. There's no lantern!"

"That CNN special said he's got an actual green lantern that he charges the ring in."

Jeff made a scornful face. "How do you 'charge' a ring in a lantern? What the-? And, who would his sidekick be, blue ankle bracelet?"

"Red Tiara!"

"Golden earring?"

"Wait, wasn't that a song or a group or something?"

"At least he's got some power," said Aaron. "Like Wally said, what about Green Arrow? I mean, he beat a crook the other day by firing an arrow with a boxing glove on the end of it. So, like, what do they do, beam him down from that Justice League satellite and say, um, go over there Green Arrow. They need someone to, uh, shoot a boxing glove at a bad guy. Really? That's a great use of resources."

They were all quiet a few moments before Wally broke in, softly, "Did you see that one with Wonder Girl?"

Aaron gasped. "Where she knocked that wall over?"

Wally gave a quick nod.

Smiles all around.

Except for Stevie.

"Ehhh."

"Gay thought!" shouted Chan.

"What? I have to think she's hot?" whined Stevie looking around the circle of the group. The other four all nodded. Yeah. You do!

"That . . ," Wally gestured a few feet downward with his chin.

"And those . . ," Chan grinned looking a little higher.

The others all grinned.

"Batgirl's hotter," said Stevie to escape.

Wally smiled and glanced at Chan who was grinning ear to ear. Batgirl. Oh. Yeah.

They joined the others in appreciative chuckles.

This was one of the boys' favorite topics of discussion though, despite their words of bravado, none of them actually had much idea what they would do if they ever encountered Wonder Girl of Batgirl. They didn't have all that clear of an idea what to do with any girl. But that didn't stop them from talking. They did so till the group started to break up as they reached each of their homes.

First was Aaron. His family lived in a huge brick mansion, something over 5,000 square feet surrounded by topiary and flowers and a lawn that had come from a sod farm 30 miles east of Jump City. Their giant Chevy Suburban and BMW suv's were there visible in the driveway as the other four kept walking. Wally shook his head slightly. Aaron's mother made such a point of bringing her reusable bags to the supermarket but the house that they cooled and heated year round was ridiculously large for just the three of them, as were their cars. She also made a big deal about never giving Aaron sugar. Wally had heard her boast to one of their neighbors that "processed sugar" had never passed Aaron's lips. He'd barely contained his smirk. Aaron was a regular at the candy machine at school and scarfed down every kind of villainous sugary treat at the others' homes. Still, she pushed that agenda. At Aaron's 11th birthday party, everyone had been served a cake which tasted like glue that she proudly announced had no sugar in it. It was heinous.

It was always a little weird for Wally at Aaron's house. His parents acted oddly deferential toward him. It took Wally a while but eventually he realized that in some bizarre way it was because they were rich and he was poor. He kept reminding himself to ask Aunt Iris about people acting this way but had so far forgotten.

As unnatural as that felt, it was worse at Stevie's house, the next one they reached. Stevie's parents, like him, were blond and seemingly always just short of fat. They were overweight but never in quite a sloppy, rolls of fat sort of way. They lived in an even bigger mansion than Aaron's family built in a combination of styles that was hard to describe but which had one consistent theme to it. It screamed "Look at us!". Stevie's family didn't feel guilty about their wealth. Quite the opposite. They had a sort of compulsion to constantly express it. They had to have the newest gadgets as soon as they came out. They constantly traded up their cars to newer models. They never bought anything without determining if it was the highest status, most sought after version of its kind. Simply being right for them wouldn't do. They were nice enough to Wally, though Aaron's dad was always remarking about how skinny Wally was to the point where it annoyed him. But they constantly showed off their wealth to Wally. "Hey, carrot top, have you ever seen a smart phone like this? Hey, West, did Stevie show you our new HD tv? 1480 ppi!" It was quickly overbearing yet they didn't seem to have any realization of it. For all the great stuff they had, it never seemed to satisfy them. They seemed to live in mortal fear that someone somewhere had a better TV or phone or computer than they did even when they didn't use half of the features of the ones they had.

The next of the five to veer off the sidewalk to his house was Jeff. Even though Chan was his best friend, Wally liked being over Jeff's house best of all. Jeff and his parents lived in an expensive, modern style house. But Jeff's parents seemed almost indifferent to money. They had some new gadgets but some old, hopelessly superseded things too. Jeff's dad drove a so-so 6 year old car and didn't seem to care. Stevie's dad would've writhed in pain at the mere notion. They had books all over their house. But what really set them apart from the others' parents was the way they took an interest in Jeff's friends. They didn't care whether they ate sugar or knew about what smart phone they had. But, one afternoon, Jeff's dad reeled off some long, clever movie quote that Wally had never heard. None of the five boys had. And Jeff's parents were distraught. It really bothered them. The next night they took the all five boys to see a movie at the huge old style theater in Jump City, the one where they ran old movies. Every month or two they would take the boys to an old movie. 'Passing down the culture' they eventually called it. The guys all made a bot of a show of this being against their will but some of the movies were great and Jeff's parents would take them to a coffee house or a restaurant in their exclusive Jump Ridge neighborhood afterward and treat them to desserts and talk it over. It was eye opening for Wally. This was how smart grown ups lived, wasn't it? Except for his Aunt Iris, no one else seemed to care what he was thinking. They saw The Third Man, Bridge on the River Kwai, The Sting, Point Blank, A Face in the Crowd, The Train, On the Waterfront, Chinatown and others. And it took the boys some getting used to, at first. At times, these movies seemed slow. And Stevie, in particular, was completely thrown that Chinatown would end the way it did. Why let that happen? Why show that to people? Couldn't he have done something? Maybe not, explained Jeff's parents. And sometimes that's how life is. Stevie resisted. Jeff's dad debated it with him.

Eventually, Wally realized that that was the whole point. Getting the five of them to debate the ideas in the movies. Wally liked it. He liked it a lot. This was different. It was the grown up world. Jeff's parents weren't staying away from the five of them almost in fear that they, as adults, were inherently not cool. They didn't care. And they weren't trying to regulate every molecule of food they ate. They were treating them like real people. Wally loved lingering over desserts in an expensive restaurant talking about things like this.

There were definitely different styles of being rich. If he ever got there he wanted it to be like that. He wished something anything like this was part of his life. His parents barely ever talked to him except for his mother complaining about how much he ate or bemoaning that he'd "come out with that . . orange hair", as though it was his fault, if it could even be said to be a bad thing for which fault would have to be determined.

Jeff waved bye to Wally and Chan and they shuffled on to Chan's. Chan's parents were unfailingly polite and almost never braggarts about their wealth. They had a smaller home than Aaron or Stevie's family. And unlike Aaron's family who made a big point of how they used Kindles and Ipads and Stevie's, who didn't seem to read any books at all, the Chans had big bookcases in three different rooms. Though Chan was his best friend Wally was always a little uncomfortable at the Chan house. For one thing, Chan's actual first name was Lee. But everyone called him Chan, except at their house where Wally had to constantly catch himself and refer to him as Lee. "Yes, ma'am. Lee and I both got A's on that test".

For another, well, it took a long time for Wally to put a finger on it, but Chan's parents, especially his mother always seemed a little nervous around him. They never quite relaxed around him. He wasn't quite sure why. At first he thought it was because he was poor and they almost regarded it as something akin to a sort of virus he was carrying and which they must be vigilant so that he didn't spread it to Chan. They always watched him carefully. But that wasn't entirely it. Besides which, they were very generous to him. They were very big on neatness. Their house was much neater than Stevie's and even more than Aaron's. Anything with the slightest flaw had to go. When Chan accidentally made a mark that could barely be seen on a new pair of chinos with a highlighter, they insisted that Chan get rid of them and suggested that he give them to Wally. He and Chan were the same height with the same waist. The pants were tight in the rear but they immediately became his best pair for school, the only ones he hadn't gotten at the Goodwill store or the Salvation Army store in Jump City.

But Wally and Chan were perfectly relaxed with each other. Without saying a word, Chan peeled off toward his house and Wally followed him. Inside the door, Chan tossed his coat aside. "It's me, Lee, Mom!" he shouted.

"And Wally, Mrs. Chan!" Wally tossed his coat where Chan had.

They waited a moment but there was only silence. Chan shrugged. Wally shrugged back. They ran up to Chan's room, Wally easily catching up despite Chan's two step head start. In a minute, they were flopped down side by side at the footboard of Chan's bed.

First they played a game of chess on Chan's gaming system. As usual, they got the game 98 percent done and then paused it. It was going to be another draw, anyway. Chan had a white knight and his king. Wally had a black bishop and his king. They then switched the system over to Soldier of Doom 7. Stevie had given Chan his copy when SoD8 had come out two weeks before. They played for a half hour before both of them had been killed, furiously blowing up opponents and shooting them, laughing and shouting as they played.

Chan hit reset but didn't start the game right away.

He turned to Wally right beside him and sighed.

"Hey . . I can't go with you on that trip to Keystone City this Friday."

"What? Why not?"

"It's my mom. She's . . she's getting totally nutty with her freaking religion."

"What's that got to do with going to Keystone City with me? We're gonna get to meet the Flash. The Flash, Chan!"

"Well, yeah, how was that gonna happen, anyway?"

"My uncle. He's a police scientist with the Keystone City Police. They've worked with Flash. I-I guess he asked him if he'd meet with a couple fans and he said yes."

Chan gave a heavy sigh. "I want to, man, but my mom won't let me. She says I already . . 'see too much of Wally West'," he imitated her voice in a sing-song cadence, "and she doesn't want me getting 'molested' by some screener at the airport."

"Oh, come on. For once! For once I have something to offer. I never have a new phone or TV or game or gadget. I can't get my parents to take us all anywhere. I can't even have you guys over. But this once I have something to offer and . . !"

"I'm sorry. Why don't you take Jeff or Aaron or even Stevie?"

Wally sighed. "It wouldn't be the same."

There was a long pause.

"She really thinks you hang around with me too much?"

"It's . . it's totally ridiculous lately, with my mom and my aunt. She got my mom into all this religious stuff. They, like, see 'gay' everywhere, now. They-"

"What?"

"They're obsessed with it. It's nuts. I think the way they see it is that every boy is straight unless he does like five or six things wrong and then he automatically becomes gay."

"Oh come on!"

"I'm serious. Remember that little league playoff game two weeks back?"

Wally nodded.

"I-I guess I gave you a pat on the butt at some point, like when you got to the dugout after scoring that time."

Wally squinted trying to recall this. "Are you sure? I don't remember that."

"My mom and my aunt did. They tried to be sort of low key about it but they were all 'what are you boys doing?' 'Why touch him there? Why did you do that? What's the point of that?" What . . what could I say? I didn't even remember doing it. Since then they're, like, always watching me. It's so ridiculous."

"Gay thought!" muttered Wally.

"Yeah, it's worse than Stevie."

"But . . wait. They think you . . and me . . ?"

Chan rolled his eyes. "I know."

"I-I didn't even know what gay guys did until Stevie and Jeff told us!"

"Me neither!"

Wally gave a half shudder thinking about it before adding, "You've got, like, 500 screen shots of Batgirl from every video that ever aired of her."

"Yeah, except that's secret. Don't go talking about that! It probably wouldn't even matter. They don't even like that we put our arms around each other's shoulders or do, like, anything even remotely touchy. If my mom saw us like this now . . "

Wally glanced back toward their feet. Their sides were pressed against each other from their ankles up to their waists where they lay on Chan's bed.

"Seriously. Separate a bit in case she comes in."

Wally sighed. So ridiculous. But he and Chan scrunched over toward the opposite sides of the bed.

"That was why I jumped in and said you had that bruise under your eye and a scrape on your head from 8th graders trying to bully us last week and left out the part about Freddie Simmons and the ballet. If they thought you were getting into fights to protect a ballet dancing boy they'd be all over you and then they'd be all over me."

Wally sighed, still trying to process the disappointment.

"Why'd you have to do that anyway? You're not that close with Freddie Simmons."

"I-I can't just let somebody get picked on. I . . I just can't. It bothers me. Doesn't it bother you?"

"Well . . yeah, but you gotta learn to pick your spots."

"It was so dumb and so unfair. He's . . he's Freddie, but he's harmless," sighed Wally.

"The-the irony is that that dancer dude didn't even seem really gay, somehow, . . . that ballet dude in the performance."

"Not for a guy jumping around in white, ass crack tights," muttered Wally. "When he talked afterward he sounded pretty normal."

"And the dude was a serious athlete. No wonder he can jump, looking like . . that."

"That jump where he came down and spun and . . . I tried to do that one at home. It's impossible."

"And the thing where he carried the girl overhead!"

"Why don't the girls have to show their asses, too?"

Chan nodded. Totally unfair.

"Imagine being a totally straight guy and you have to jump around in tights like that," muttered Wally.

Down below there was the sound of the door opening and the voice of Chan's mother. "Lee?"

"I'm up here, mom, with Wally!" Lee shouted.

"There's really no way?" pleaded Wally.

"They told me no."

Wally sighed. "Just once I wanted to be the one providing something for one of you guys. Just once."

Chan gave him a pat on the shoulder but quickly withdrew his hand as he heard his motherj's steps ascending the stairs. He switched the game back to chess. When Mrs. Chan opened the door to her son's room she saw him and his friend Wally separated by a foot or more finishing out a game of chess.

"Working on your chess for the chess team. Good!" pronounced Mrs. Chan.

Wally said he had to go a few minutes later and grabbed his backpack and coat and headed out to the street. He went through the woods at the end of the cul-de-sac where the Chans lived and down a hill to a railroad crossing. The Wests lived, literally, on the wrong side of the tracks. He ducked under the red and white swing arm while the warning bells were sounding but there was still no train.

He made his way down one street, turned left and approached the dirty, tiny West home.

"Back to the 'never' oval," he muttered under his breath.


	2. Aunt Iris and Uncle Boring

Author's note: This chapter had to be broken into two. It would be just too long otherwise

===TT===TT===TT

Most of the time kids go about their lives not questioning the rhythm or routine or rules of it. They haven't seen other places or other ways to live. All they know is what the've lived and whatever it is, they adjust to it, however they have to.

Wally's days had a certain variety to them away from home. He could exhale and relax away from home. But inside the cramped little West home he avoided notice. It wasn't a conscious plan. It didn't start out that way. He couldn't remember when it started. It was always like that.

He got home, tried to figure out what dinner their might be and when it might happen without having to directly ask anyone, maybe his sister if he absolutely had to. Then he would eat, in his room if anyone else was also eating, on the kitchen table if the house was otherwise empty. If no one else was home, he might watch TV. If he heard a car pull up he quickly shut it off and went to his room.

His room was a six foot wide, nine foot long projection off one side of the house. It had once been a sort of a breezeway connection to a garage that burned down years before the Wests moved there. The previous owner had torn down the charred garage but left the untouched breezeway intending to some day replace the garage. But they never did. Nor did the Wests. They didn't have any money to build any garage. So there was that little room off the corner of the kitchen. It was quickly decided that that would be Wally's room. His sister got a full sized bedroom upstairs across from his parents' bedroom. Even though he was two years older than her and bigger, she got the bigger room. That's just the way it was. He wasn't mad about it. He didn't expect anything else.

Mostly he tried to stay low, stay inconspicuous, not get noticed. Getting noticed was never good. Never. If his mother or father noticed him it would mean he got yelled at. That was the lowest stage of things. He could get yelled at if he'd done something wrong or if he'd done nothing wrong. But he couldn't get yelled at if he hadn't been noticed. And things could get much worse than that. With his father it got as bad as a hard backhanded slap. That was the way his father vented anger at him. But it didn't happen very often. His father mostly looked at him with cold, cold eyes and an expression of something between disgust and a forbearance now exhausted. But his father didn't yell at him or almost never yelled at him. He barely ever talked to Wally. He talked to Wally through his mother.

"Tell your son to pick up that pigsty of a room of his."

"Tell your son to put out the trash like he was supposed to."

Your son. Your son. Not worth being considered his son. And somehow, the translation through his mother always included extra anger. She was the one Wally most feared. His father was not around some of the time. Some sort of business trips, Wally had heard him say to his sister. And as unencouraging as his father was, there was a certain consistency to how he treated Wally. He was always that way.

His mother fluctuated. Her attitude was never very nice toward him but sometimes it had strong elements of being resigned to him. Sometimes she treated him like a benign addition to the family. At other times, she would shout and rage that he was no good. She never should've had him. Why did he have to be such a burden? Why did he have to be so messy? Why did he have to be . . . whatever was the handy epithet of the moment? The condemnation didn't have to have particular rhyme or reason to it. And the standards of it didn't have to make sense. His sister could do something and he could then do the same thing and be punished with nothing ever befalling his sister.

So Wally stayed low. He remained inconspicuous. But his mother's unpredictable moods could never be avoided entirely and sometimes her need to rage at Wally for household misdemeanors real or imagined was not satisfied by words. In those times she would grab Wally's wrist. He had once tried to run away as she reached for him but there was nowhere to go in a small house. And she gave him more whacks that time. She would grab his wrist and march up to his mother and father's bedroom upstairs and sit down on the edge of the bed. She would push him over her knees, pull back his pants and reach for an oversized hairbrush from her dresser and give him twenty or more hard whacks across his bare bottom. She never even used that one. It was ridiculously big. All it served as was a paddle for his rear. He'd once been home alone and gone upstairs with a notion in mind to take it and throw it away by the railroad tracks a few blocks away. But he stopped when he reached for it. It was too powerful. He couldn't make himself touch it.

When he was younger, Wally invariably cried as the result of these capricious corporal punishments. When he was 10, for the first time, Wally was able to endure it without crying. He pulled his pants up and rubbed his backside and stared at her, his eyes blazing with accusation of unfairness. But this just got him 20 more whacks after which he very much did cry. Since then, he did not cry but he immediately retreated to his room without making eye contact. Stay low. Be inconspicuous.

Sometimes it wasn't even his mother's moods. When report cards came out at the end of one school year, Wally, as usual, had gotten all A's. His sister had gotten a variety of grades, some good some bad. She moaned about how hard it was to get good grades. Wally told her that it wasn't that hard if you'd just read some books now and then. This seemed pretty obvious to him. His tiny room looked chaotic but most of that was stacks of books that he'd gotten free from library giveaways or in other ways. His sister had almost no books in her room.

That night, his sister blamed something she'd done on him and Wally found himself being led up to his mother's room. From his upended position over his mother's knees, he caught a glimpse of his sister at the top of the stairway smiling at his punishment. He endured his twenty whacks, pulled up his pants and marched right past her down the stairs and to his room.

So, he laid low. There was no point in anything else. It was a routine to which he was completely adjusted. He had a hard time making friends his first year of school because it was difficult for him, at first, to open up even part of the day. Only in his second year of school, out in Jump City, did he become friends with Chan and later with Jeff, Aaron and Stevie. He gradually became accustomed to being a little more natural Wally for part of the day.

He didn't have a plan for how he would get out of this. Leave for college at 18 and never look back! Run away from home! He didn't think of these things. He just wanted to be inconspicuous. He got out of it reading. He read and read and read. And in round cornered paperbacks, yellowing hardcovers even fatigued leather bounds he traveled north to Alaska with Jack London, down the Mississippi with Mark Twain, to Paris with Flaubert, england with Dickens and to sea with Conrad. He read fiction and non-fiction, mysteries, histories, crime and comic books. He was laying low in his tiny room but he was traveling the planet and epochs in words. It gave him release that made adherence to the strictures of life at home endurable.

But the landscape of this tightly circumscribed life wasn't impervious to change even if it couldn't come from him.

The first powerful tremors came when he was seven years old. He met his Aunt Iris at Thanksgiving that year. Of course, he must have met her before that. He was her nephew after all. But she had been off on investigative assignments November and December each of the last two years. He couldn't really remember seeing her at age 4.

Iris West was a reporter, a writer and an investigator. Aunt Iris was famous or at least famous for a writer. She wrote stories for newspapers and magazines. She'd been on TV, too. She exposed bad guys and how they'd been cheating people. And because of her bad guys went to jail. Wally thought that was just the greatest thing, that a person could just write about what bad guys were doing and they'd end up in jail. It was almost like she was a hero like Batman or Superman or that new one, the Flash.

She had an air about her. It wasn't just that she was famous. At the family get together outside Jump City, everyone paid attention to her because of that. But, even the uncles and cousins who were a lot bigger than her sort of feared her. He could tell. They deferred to her. And they were careful around her. But she wasn't mean or intimidating. At least Wally didn't think so. She was usually cheerful and in a sort of joking mood. But, in some obscure way, she was in charge in that room, sort of the queen of the room, but a nice queen, the kind that all the subjects might like and want to please.

But his parents didn't seem to appreciate her reign. Wally was never quite sure why but they didn't seem to like her. They stayed on the opposite side of the room from her. It didn't make any sense to him. He took to her right from the start and, amazingly, she liked him. From the moment he came in the door at their relatives big house north of Jump City on Thanksgiving when he was seven, Aunt Iris waved him over and gave him a hug. He was rigid at first. Wally couldn't remember the last time he got a hug. He squeezed back just a bit before she let go.

And then he started to wander away, looking for a safe spot in the room, an inconspicuous spot where no one would notice him. He had a great sense for where to go to avoid people. But as he was slinking off, she called to him from her chair, laughing. "Wally? Where're you going?"

He only stammered.

"C'mere," she waved him over and had him sit on the arm of her leather chair. And she had him sit next to her at the table when they all ate. He was the only kid who got to sit at the grownups' table. And after eating, she had him sit on the arm of her chair all afternoon, through two lopsided football games. And she peppered him with questions about school and how things were at home. On the latter subject, he could tell that what he said got her angry, though she kept her comments short. And he liked this. But still he sensed that he should speak softly about these things and he answered her questions about his parents in barely more than a whisper. No one had ever asked him questions about those things. But his famous Aunt did.

He wanted to ask her, in turn, about being a famous reporter but didn't know what to say. Finally, he stuttered out something about how she was nearly a hero herself, just like Batman and Superman and Flash, the way she dealt with bad guys.

He grinned with joy at how much she loved that comment. "Just like that new one in the red suit, the Flash, huh?"

Wally only nodded, being unable to speak he was so happy to have pleased his aunt.

When it was time to go, she gave him another hug and a big kiss on the cheek and Wally almost couldn't remember feeling like he needed to be as inconspicuous as possible. He walked right in the door of their house and sat in the middle of the couch. He said something about how great Aunt Iris was and his mother got madder and madder. She practically invented his having done something wrong and 10 minutes later, after an escalating rant about how he was a no good boy, he found himself rubbing his sore rear end after getting 30 whacks not just the usual 20 with the oversized hair brush.

He got a crash course in the next four weeks as his parents seemed to take out that inexplicable antipathy for Aunt Iris on him. But it wasn't quite the same. Even when everything they did and said transmitted the message of how much of a burden he was and that everything he did, everything about him was wrong, there was the clear recollection of Aunt Iris thinking otherwise. It was like something he kept in a vault or a safe that he could take out if he really needed. He stayed low. He kept inconspicuous. But now he had something in a safe.

Christmas eve came and they went back to the same relatives' house north of Jump City. As soon as he was inside the door, Aunt Iris, already there, waved him over to her chair. He sat there on the arm of her chair all night long. And, again, his famous aunt peppered him with questions. And she let him go on for longer than any adult ever seemed likely to, about chemicals and chemistry. He wasn't sure how they'd gotten to talking about that but he started telling her about how the subject was fascinating to him and all the things he knew. Finally out of breath, he stared at her. He couldn't believe she had sat there for all that. She gave him a look back that seemed to say that she knew what he was thinking and then gave him a hug about his shoulders. He exhaled and it seemed like he'd never exhaled so completely before.

Having gotten the gift of his aunt's attention, Wally was perfectly accepting of his fate when the clock struck midnight and everyone started opening presents from the huge pile under and beside the tree. He didn't get presents at home. Or he'd get one small thing while his sister got six or seven. That's just the way it was. He accepted it and stayed low. At the Thanksgiving get together, all the grown ups had picked a name or two and had since bought presents for them. Wally was prepared for what was to come. He was used to dealing with it. He didn't get gifts at his relatives either. Santa must've dropped yours on the way, his mother had said. So, Wally sat there on the arm of Aunt Iris's chair in perfect equanimity as gift wrapped presents went everywhere else around the room where they were opened to ooo's and ahhh's. As the pile dwindled, Aunt Iris got a white blouse from one of the uncles and held it up after unwrapping it. Everyone ooo'd and ahhh'd and she said a big thank you.

Finally, there was only one present left, a huge box bigger than any 4 of the others. Wally wasn't even watching the presents. He was watching Aunt Iris smile. It felt good. Aunt Iris had to direct his attention 90 degrees away from her by pointing toward the tree.

"Huh?"

"It's for you, Wally."

He was perplexed. "For me? You mean a phone call?" He looked around for the phone in question.

Aunt Iris chuckled and pointed to the giant box. One of the cousins had stood the red and yellow wrapped box up on end. It was taller than he was and three feet wide and nearly a foot thick.

"It's for you, Wally," she repeated.

He stepped off the arm of her chair, looking back quizzically and then made his way hesitantly across the room past discarded bows and pieces of wrapping paper to the box. All his relatives were staring at him. The silence and expectation in the air made him tense. Wally looked back at his aunt. Was this some sort of cruel trick? Aunt Iris raised an eyebrow and nodded toward the box. Go on. Wally approached the huge present hesitantly. Underneath a big bow was a tag.

TO WALLA WALLA WALLY

FROM AUNT IRIS

Wally read it again. What the-? Walla Walla Wally? Where was that from? He vaguely remembered hearing that before, but where?

He looked back at Aunt Iris still not quite accepting that this could happen.

"Well, go ahead and open it, kid! It's yours."

Wally caught his breath. It really was? He turned back to the box and tore the wrapping off as fast as he could and there it was, too good to dare even dream about but there it was.

His jaw dropped. It was impossible. But there it was.

The Kessler-Zeiss Deluxe Chemistry Set.

Thecoolestgiftever!

He was speechless a moment before finally shouting, "Ohmygod!"

The room filled with chuckles and he practically leaped back across the room into Aunt Iris's waiting hug saying over and over "Thank you, Aunt Iris! Thank you!"

It took a long time to compose himself but when he did he ran back to the box and then dragged it over to stand in front of her.

The Kessler-Zeiss Deluxe! He could barely breathe. The Kessler-Zeiss Deluxe! Not just the Kessler-Zeiss Boy Scientist Kit, the Deluxe! And it was . . . his!

"497 chemicals!"

"9042 experiments!"

"Precipitate Salts to Your Heart's Content!"

"Hours and hours of scientific fun!"

Wally couldn't think of any fun better than that!

The Kessler-Zeiss Deluxe!

He was still hyperventilating fifteen minutes later and not completely sure it had happened even a half hour later.

An uncle made a joke about something called "Zyklon-B" that Wally didn't get. Another joked about him burning down their house.

He promised he'd be careful. And he asked Aunt Iris how she ever knew to get him that. She said that he'd talked about how much he liked chemistry at Thanksgiving. And she said she knew a scientific sort of man back in Keystone City. She said she'd asked him, "If you were a 7 year old boy, what present would you want to get?" And this is what he'd said.

At the end of the night, Wally hugged and kissed Aunt Iris and was running through his head all the experiments he could conduct on the car ride home. He barely noticed his parents' sour mood or their remark that his getting such a ridiculous gift from Aunt Iris justified their only giving presents to his sister again this year.

If anything, the emotional atmosphere at home got even worse. His mother seemed to always be in a bad mood, muttering about "high and mighty Iris this" and "show off Iris that". Wally got dragged up to the bedroom for the hair brush twice in just one week. But after each time he went right down to the basement to his 497 chemicals to conduct more of the 9042 experiments. He thought about little else. And he found that he could be even more inconspicuous down in the basement.

He was already called a 'nerd' at school and by his sister but his complete fixation and fascination with his chemistry set cemented this reputation for good. His sister would have friends of hers over the house and they would open the door to the basement and go down the stairs a step or two and gawk at him. He never noticed until they said something. He was always too absorbed in whatever experiment he was conducting. He was examining the material of life, of the world. And part way through he'd hear giggles and dumb remarks from his stupid sister and her friends. He'd glance up and then ignore them.

He showed his chemistry set to his friend Chan. Chan was the only one of his new friends that he ever had over his house. Because Chan was his best friend and Chan was the one most interested in chemistry. He ran some of the experiments with him. Some involved multiple chemicals and processes such that they were much easier for two people to do. But after a while, Wally stopped bringing even Chan over to the West house. Chan had been there several times before Wally introduced him to his mother. This is my friend Lee Chan, Chan for short. This is my mother. That sort of thing. And he'd idly added something about Chan's family living in a sort of mansion. His mother's expression changed. She had seemed to be in one of her best moods. But a few minutes later she was grumbling about everything. And a half hour later she was grabbing Wally by the wrist and leading him up to the bedroom. He protested that he hadn't done anything but got 20 whacks just the same. He tried desperately to compose himself before going back downstairs and ushering Chan down to the basement and the chemistry set.

"Was that what I think it was?" was all Chan asked.

Wally nodded. He rubbed his sore butt. "My parents are insane."

And with that the topic was closed. But Wally didn't have Chan over any more. He went over Chan's house instead and sometimes Aaron's or Stevie's or Jeff's.

The next year, at the holidays, Aunt Iris showed up with a man named Barry Allen. He was her fiance. He was the man she'd said she knew from Keystone City who was sort of a scientific sort of man. Boy was he ever. He could talk science till you walked away in complete confusion. He was tallish and blond and sort of athletic seeming, handsome too, Wally supposed, but he was all about science.

By the holidays the year after that, he and Aunt Iris had married. Now he was Uncle Barry. Uncle Boring some of the cousins called him. Almost any conversation on almost any topic, if you asked him a question in the cours of it, he'd ramble on for a few minutes giving you a sophisticated scientific lecture on the subject. Wally loved this sort of talk but it was too much even for him.

Someone would mention the Simpsons cartoon and that Homer Simpson was depicted working at a nuclear power plant. And two or three minutes later Uncle Barry would be winding down a quick lecture on the nature of typical existing nuclear power plants and the benefits of instead using liquid fluoride thorium reactors which he explained would be much cheaper and safer. An idle mention of the Everready Bunny and Uncle Barry went off on a few minutes long recounting of the comparative test results of Everready and Duracell batteries and why the patented cell construction of the latter was superior.

Uncle Boring.

But he had a job in science. He was a police scientist he explained to Wally. That seemed like just the greatest thing to Wally. Working in science . . and . . fighting crime! He asked Uncle Barry if it was just like that CSI tv show. Uncle Barry said it wasn't nearly as exciting or glamorous as all that. He said he did a lot of paper work and that, a lot of times, the TV show misrepresented what they could actually do. He launched into a minutes long explanation of how you couldn't actually do some DNA test that they had shown them doing on CSI because of several complicating factors. His explanation was more than complicated enough. Half the room had been paying attention to him at first. By the time he was winding down, ". . and those are 11 complicating factors in drawing a suitable epithelial DNA sample under such conditions in the field." . . everyone else but Wally was looking down at their shoes or getting up to freshen their drink.

Uncle Boring.

But he had met the Flash. Flash was Wally's favorite super hero. Other kids like Superman or Batman. The girls all went for Wonder Woman. He liked Flash. There was just something about him. He seemed like a better guy than Batman or Green Arrow and it was hard to much identify with Superman. And his power was so simple and yet so great. Super speed. Wally quickly settled on Flash as his favorite. He would sneak into the back room at the school library where they kept the newspapers and he'd make copies of the articles about him.

Flash foils Bank Robbers!

Flash puts Captain Cold on ice!

Flash shows Gorilla Grodd who's top banana!

The headline writers didn't show much restraint. But Wally didn't have much, either, when it came to the Flash. And Uncle Barry had met him and even worked with him. Flash did most of his crime fighting in the Keystone City area so he had a lot of interaction with the Keystone City Police Department. Wally asked Uncle Barry what Flash was like and about his powers but Uncle Barry didn't seem to be able to tell him much of anything. He apparently just saw him once in a while at a crime scene as Flash was leaving and he was showing up.

Back home after holiday get togethers, Wally's mother, father and even sister would laugh at and make jokes about Uncle Boring. "The biggest stuffed shirt ever!" Whatever that meant. "If they ever give anybody in Keystone City the death penalty they won't need to give 'em an injection. He could just go in and talk for a few minutes and bore 'em to death!" Ha ha ha.

Nerdus Maximus, his sister started calling him. Wally knew better than to defend him. Somehow it would just end up with him getting 20 whacks across his butt from that stupid oversized hair brush. Okay, Uncle Bo-Uncle Barry went a little far. But he was a good guy and if Aunt Iris liked him then he was okay with Wally.

And at Christmas the year Wally was in sixth grade, Uncle Barry mentioned that he'd try to set up a trip for Wally to come to Keystone City and see him at work and to meet the Flash.


	3. Boy Scientist meets lightning bolt

Wally knew that Friday would be a lucky day for him. It had to be. Empress spent the night with him.

Empress was the neighbors' cat, a little abyssinian that acted like she ruled the neighborhood. She almost did. She hunted everything smaller than her. She was observed carrying birds, mice, frogs, snakes and chipmunks back to her house. As for larger animals, she had clawed the noses of two different dogs, driving them off and she was quite particular about people. She didn't let just anyone pick her up or pet her. She sometimes strolled into the West yard but she wouldn't let Wally's mother or sister or father pick her up. She either walked discreetly away first or hissed and brandished five claws.

But she liked Wally. He often slept with the one small window in his room open. And occasionally, he would wake up in the middle of the night to find that Empress had jumped in the window and was purring atop him.

Lately he'd noticed that on the days after Empress had jumped in his window and slept atop him, a lot of good things had happened, tests had been aced, he'd come in first at Chess team competitions and Empress's visits had even coincided with his seeing Aunt Iris.

So, when Wally awoke in the early morning hours of Friday to the weight on his chest of a furiously purring Empress, he regarded it as a good sign. He petted her and bunched up the covers at his sides to keep himself in place and not disturb her. He would only have a few more hours of sleep as his flight out to Keystone City was the red eye just before 6 a.m.

Aunt Iris had arranged everything including having the airport limo, actually just an extra long van, outside the West house at 5 a.m. to take him to the airport. A yawning Wally barely got out the door in time in his only, dress pants and with his hair combed as though for a formal occasion with a distinct part. He was going to look his best and most respectable visiting Uncle Barry at work.

The van just made it through five lights in a row, all of them turning red just after they passed through, reinforcing in Wally the notion that Empress's visits were lucky. He started to question his luck when the buzzer went off as he walked through the metal detector arch. He stopped and looked around. That couldn't be because of him. The security people waived him over to the other line. The grope line. Wally stammered and tried to protest that this must be a mistake.

In full view of other passengers, two fat women, one white and one black both wearing rubber gloves and shirts identifying them as working for the "TSA" approached him and thoroughly groped the 6th grader from head to toe with particular attention to his hips front and back.

"H-hey! Don't touch me there! Hey! . . Come on! Hey, that's my . . ! How could I hide anything there?"

"Is that all you back there?"

"Yes it's all me! How could it not be . . ?"

When he finally got on the plane, he could see other passengers smirking partly at the ridiculousness of anyone thinking this boy was a threat. He didn't mind too much. There was an element of sympathy in the way they were all looking at him. And, more good luck, he got a window seat on the plane just as he'd wanted.

From there, he watched the whole country approach from in front of the jetliner's wing and then recede behind that same wing. And when he landed there was Aunt Iris standing at the edge of the crowd holding a rectangle of cardboard on which had been written in magic marker "BOY SCIENTIST". Wally laughed. Nothing could be bad that included Aunt Iris. This was definitely a lucky day.

Wally got a big hug from Aunt Iris and laughed again at her sign and walked through the airport to the parking lot, stopping only to get a bag of trail mix from a vending machine. He'd wolfed it all down before they'd even got on the highway. Aunt Iris grinned and shook her head at the sight of him holding empty bag the upside down over his mouth desperately trying to get any stray sunflower seeds from the package.

She dropped him off at the main entrance of the Keystone City Police Headquarters with apologies that she had to go chase down a source for a story she was working on.

"Too bad you can't have Flash do that kind of chasing for you!" he said as he was getting out of the car.

"You just remember, your Uncle Barry's pretty special, too. It's not only super powered types that deserve your admiration."

Wally nodded.

But as good a guy as Uncle Barry was, he wasn't Flash.

Other kids at school liked Superman or Batman or the Green Lantern. There were even a couple boys who were big fans of the Green Arrow and half the girls at school seemed to imagine themselves as Wonder Woman. Wally was a huge fan of the Flash. First of all, Flash wasn't hugely muscular like Superman or Batman or even Aquaman. He was super athletic of course, but in a slender, energetic way, like a perfect olympic runner, not quite as skinny as the guys who ran the 800 meters and longer distances and not as beefy as the guys who ran the 400 meters and shorter distances. This appealed to Wally because he was very fast and he was skinny, even for an 11 year old boy. He was average height or maybe just a bit taller but with a small waist.

And there was something else about Flash. Green Arrow came across as a bit too full of himself. Superman was a sort of boring mister establishment. Batman seemed like a bitter loner. Flash seemed . . intellectual, but not bitterly obsessed or anything. And Flash was the only one whose city seemed to really love him. Superman was just sort of there in Metropolis. People in Gotham seemed to regard Batman only a little less warily than the crooks. Out in Star City, Green Arrow was just another celebrity. But they loved Flash in Keystone City. Wally had seen the video of him speeding through the City and everyone waving to him. Everyone. They even built a Flash museum to honor him.

And, in a way his power, super speed was the most appealing one to a boy scientist. There was speed, acceleration, vibrating molecules, man made tornadoes, all sorts of phenomena to be measured and appreciated with science, not just strength. Flash was Wally's favorite. He followed every news story, every item about him.

Wally couldn't wait to meet him. 5 o'clock his Uncle had said. He'll come to the lab at 5 o'clock. It was 2 o'clock as he jogged up the front steps of KCPD.

"I'm here to see my Uncle, Mr. Allen," he said checking in with the officer at the long counter facing the entrance. "I'm Wally West."

The man nodded and flipped through some sheets on a clipboard, finally stopping with his finger on one line of a sheet near the back.

"Yup, here it is, a . . Wallace Rudolf West-"

Wally made a face. Rudolf! Thanks Mom and Dad!

" . . to see Mr. Allen up in the science lab."

Wally nodded. The officer at the desk called for another uniformed officer behind him to escort Wally up there. It was an embarassingly fat guy and it was an effort for Wally to walk as slow down the maze of hallways they traveled as the fat policman walked. Wally couldn't help but speculate that if he was a crook running from this cop, there was no way he'd be caught. No way.

Finally he led him to what was obviously the science lab. Non-descript desks and offices gave way to a room lined with encased bookcases and filled with lab tables, test tubes, beakers, all sorts of chemical apparatus and several computers. The officer who'd led him there stopped short in the hallway, just pointing at the door with the placard reading "SCIENCE LAB" beside it. Wally walked in hesitantly. Off to one side, his Uncle Barry was filling out forms on his desk.

"Uncle Barry?"

"Ah, Wally!". His uncle got up to greet him and gave him a tour of the Science Lab. There was the main room with his desk, almost 50 feet by 100 feet and a store room off the side of it. Uncle Barry explained that there were two other police scientists who worked with him who were out near the City limits working a case and who weren't expected back that day.

Uncle Barry was nice enough. He showed him around chemicals here for this, computers there for that. Oh, there was an odd metal ring with three cameras that he had Wally stand in the center of three metal lines dropped from the cameras to the floor then Uncle Barry dropped the ring with the cameras to the floor. That was unusual and kind of neat. But after a typical Uncle Boring extended explanation of a simple question,

"Oh, that experiment? Well, Wally . . .

" . . and those, Wally, are the 27 things you can do with an erlenmeyer flask."

Wally sighed. God! After a bit more of a tour, Uncle Barry went back to his desk and back to filling out paper forms. Wally was left to wander the lab asking a series of unrelated questions, what's this, what do you use this for, what are those chemicals in those test tubes, where do you do the ballistics testing etc, etc. Uncle Barry was incredibly patient and eventually Wally realized that he was being rude with his constant interruptions. But there was so many fascinating things in that lab. Wally couldn't help but be abuzz with curiosity about it all.

Finally Wally shuffled over to a series of high shelves opposite the lab's big windows overlooking some parking areas and an adjacent warehouse. He glanced back at his uncle filling out more paper work. Wally shook his head. Uncle Boring. He looked at the clock. It was still an hour till Flash was due to arrive. To pass the time, Wally started idly reading the scribbled indication of the continents of the containers on the shelves opposite the window.

His eyes bugged out. "Ohmygod!" he gasped

He bounced from side to side looking at all the big beakers and flasks on the shelves.

They were the coolest!

Well, to a boy who had started the junior high's chemistry club they seemed imbued with superlative coolness. His blue eyes were big as saucers as he walked back and forth looking at them.

Ohmygoshohmygoshohmygosh! Uncle Barry has the coolest stuff on the planet! A series of the largest beakers at eye level were filled with multicolored liquids, powders and solids, all of which seemed to have skull and crossbone stickers with the word "TOXIC" slapped on them and with special tops on them to prevent even a hint of them from escaping. They were like dangerous wild animals that had to be caged at all times. He read the exotic chemical names in awed gasps.

"White phosphorus! Awesome! And fluorosulfuric acid . . oh my gosh . . trifluoromethanesulfonic acid! Wow. You have the coolest lab, Uncle Barry. Oh . . oh wow . . fluoroantimonic acid! Oh my gosh! You've-you've actually got fluoroantimonic acid, Uncle Barry! That's, like, the strongest stuff there is!"

Barry Allen looked up from the form he was filling out and smiled at his orange haired nephew. For once a kid didn't just want to see the SWAT team guys' Glocks.

Wally approached the shelf and pushed on one of them with a slightly reddish tinge. It was like touching a big cat through the bars at the zoo. He smiled at the menacing hiss it gave off and watched the gentle sway of the ludicrously caustic, temporarily benign liquid. He tried working out the chemical formula and atomic weight for that acid and then the yellowish one in the next huge beaker and then the one after that.

Finally, it was just after 5 o'clock and Wally was getting antsy. He looked over at his uncle. Still no Flash.

"Are you sure he's coming, Uncle Barry?" he called across the lab to his uncle scribbling away at some papers.

Uncle Barry nodded casual as could be while still filling out forms. God he did a lot of paper work. Wally had thought his uncle's work would be like the CSI tv show. But mostly his uncle seemed to fill out paper work. That's all he ever seemed to be doing. Uncle Boring.

"How do you know?"

"I'm sure he will."

"But he's late. Maybe he had to answer a call from . . the Justice League or-or maybe he's fighting a-a villain!"

"No. He'll be here."

Wally frowned. His uncle's certainty was ridiculous. He didn't know! It felt patronizing. At least admit some uncertainty about it. I'm not a baby. I'm almost 12! I can handle it.

He turned back to the chemicals. He couldn't bear to watch his uncle filling out yet another form.

Outside what had been a sunny sky had suddenly clouded over with a bank of dark clouds directly overhead and blocking out the sun. There was a rumble of thunder. Wally glanced over his shoulder. There was a huge window right behind him.

"Hmmph. That sure rolled in fast," he mumbled to himself and then thought of a question. Why were the chemicals in this order? It didn't make any sense. It wasn't alphabetical or by possible uses or atomic weight or . . anything. He turned to his uncle and gestured at all the shelves of chemicals and called across the room, "Is there any reason why you have them organized like this, Uncle Barry?"

"Just, um, trying to repeat an . . uh . . an experiment from 3 years ago."

"Can I help?"

_**BANG!**_

With a simultaneous explosion of light and sound, a gargantuan bolt of lightning smashed through the windows and struck Wally and not only him but most of the exotic acids on the shelves a few feet away.

Wally was somehow lifted into the air by the skyfull of electricity suddenly shooting through him, paralyzed and shaken like a rag doll, his head and whole body whipping forward and back at an incredible pace. At first everything happened too fast. He couldn't think or process it. White light. Paralyzed. Zzzt! Zzzt! Zzzt! Hot. Cold. Killing acids flying at him. He was being torn apart or perhaps overloaded with energy. It all happened at once and too fast to take in any of it.

But then, the weirdest thing happened.

Abruptly, it all slowed down. He was still paralyzed and just off the ground but everything slowed down. And he couldn't move or speak but he could feel and he could see. His head was shaking up and down very fast with the incredible shock of the current but now that shaking, too, was slow. Very very slow.

When his head, now taking seemingly forever to cycle up and down from his chin hitting his chest to facing up at the ceiling, was facing even close to forward, he could see the analog clock on the wall of Uncle Barry's lab. Five seventeen and 37 seconds. Still 37 seconds. Still. Still. The thin red second hand seemed to want to linger there and not want to move on to 38.

Wally felt likewise. With the bizarre slowing of things, he could suddenly think again. In this eddy pool of time he somehow had his thoughts. He would at least get another few minutes, he thought. He didn't know how this was happening but implicitly settled on the theory that this is how you died, not seeing your life replayed before your eyes but with your sense of time dramatically slowing just before you . . stopped. That must be it. Because, he was sure that he was going to die. If this lightning bolt didn't kill him, which it probably would, all the chemicals would certainly finish the job. They were strong enough and there was enough acid to eat through a dozen Wally Wests. The best he could possibly do would be to still be fit for an open casket if none burned through the front of his head. That was the best possible outcome, an open casket funeral.

He watched them flying at him, at random intervals, shooting out of smashed or exploding glass, splashing off of the shelves and then at him with random frequency, several at once then a gap then a few then another barrage. They were all different sizes, some the equal of peas, some the size of soap bubbles, the occasional potato. It was almost balletic the way all the killing little orbs floated at him, the light glinting off them. He could have easily imagined a classical music soundtrack to it. And they would kill him. He knew that and yet somehow, in this different speed of time, this didn't scare him. Maybe it was because he was so certain of it. The acids on those shelves were so caustically powerful, each dollop would eat right through his skin and flesh and perhaps get used up in going through bones or maybe some of the hissing red stuff would eat right through his body and come out the back. The power of all the clear and yellow and red peas and soap bubbles and potatoes was more than enough to eat away his body.

It was unavoidable. And, somehow, the inevitability let him appreciate the beauty of it, the way that light glinted off the deadly liquid projectiles. There wasn't anything to do. He was going to die. Why not appreciate the light and shapes and colors of these impossibly stretched last few seconds of life?

There was something else. He started to feel, even if he was temporarily paralyzed but he couldn't feel the acids somehow. What a beautiful respite this was. As his head slowly moved forward and then back, a fiftieth, a hundredth, maybe a thousandth of actual speed, who knew what fraction it was really moving, a glob of deadly acid the size and shape of a bar of soap struck him right in the face. So much for an open casket. He could feel his clothes and his shoes but somehow, this flesh searing stuff didn't register. He only felt a little wet. He was thankful that, at least for this fraction of a second stretched out impossibly long, he wasn't feeling the excruciating pain that was going to kill him.

He could feel was his body. Strangely, all his muscles were pleasantly warm. But some different parts of him were distinctly warmer and a few certain sports were somehow cold. His wrists and forearms were icy. His waist, the sides of his hips, too, were cold. And they felt squeezed. He couldn't even move his eyes and tried to take in whatever evidence there was in his field of vision as his head spasmed back and forth in the lightning bolt but couldn't see anything different. Maybe it was the unstoppable acids. Maybe they were eating through nerves in varying ways. Because, in other places, he ticked them off in his thoughts, his hands and feet, shoulders, crotch, calves, butt, throat and jaw he felt just the opposite, burning up hot. He decided that this was just the random result of the acids eating into his nerves, sometimes causing one false sensation, sometimes another. And he saw the clock and it still read five seventeen and 37 seconds. And the bones of his legs felt as if hot orange embers had been taken from a campfire and sprinkled inside them. Maybe this was the beginning of the unstoppable killing pain of the acids eating through him. At this point it was mild.

Amid all of this, his thoughts turned to his Aunt Iris and Chan and his other friends. He'd never get to see them again, never laugh with them, never get to prove to his Aunt that he deserved the affection she showed him. He would have cried if he hadn't been paralyzed. He made one of those typically empty vows. If I ever get out of this alive, I'll always . . .

He didn't even finish the thought. It was impossible and he knew it. And now another sensation was overpowering all the others. Deep in his gut, below the navel, a feeling that he could never describe. It was sort of the cold again but there was another aspect to it, a pull, like-like a vacuum, like it somehow threatened to pull his entire body into a small spot inside him. It made no sense but that was what it felt like.

And the pull got stronger and stronger. Just as he was starting to wonder if it would tear him apart and just as he was wondering if he could stand any more of this, the lightning stopped and the sound fell away and he dropped to the floor of the lab into a kneeling position. All at once the paralysis was gone, the hot and cold spots were gone and he could move and breath.

"A-a-a-aaaaahhhhhhhh!" he gasped in shock both at what had happened and that he was still alive.

He flinched right away, knowing that the lab's store of exceptionally powerful acids must be eating away his body. But he forced himself to open his eyes and look down and saw that his clothes had been decimated but he was strangely, impossibly unhurt. He looked again because he knew that this was wrong. But through the tattered remnants of his clothes, everywhere he saw skin it was pink and perfect and . .

He closed his eyes again, muttering " . . some sort of delusion" to himself. He opened them again. H-how?

He rose unsteadily to his feet. His legs felt very odd. He must be wrong but he actually felt . . taller. His balance was unsteady. He looked down at his feet and they were larger. He knew this with certainty because the acids had eaten holes through half the leather of his shoes and his feet had burst through the weakened, swiss cheese remainder. His toes extended completely beyond his shoes.

He stared.

What the-?

The acids had easily destroyed the leather of his shoes but his feet were fine. This was the case with everything he was wearing!

H-how? How could his skin be tougher than the leather of his shoes?

The chemicals had burned right through half of the legs of his pants and at the edges of the holes had turned the material to a sort of weak plastic. His leather belt, a great pickup at the Goodwill store, was blackened and brittle like a strip of bacon left on a grill all day. Most of his sweater was gone and his button down shirt beneath it had fared no better.

Yet all of his skin that he could see was pale and perfect, unscarred and apparently untouched. A faint steam rose off his skin but he was unscathed.

"H-how?" he gasped.

While puzzling at this, he realized he'd just absentmindedly pushed wet hair back from his face. He frantically examined his hand. What the-? It almost didn't seem like his. It was larger.

It was also dry.

But . . if his hair was wet, it was wet with fluorosulfuric acid and trifluoromethanesulfonic acid and fluoroantimonic acid, all these acids super heated and shot full of electricity. You couldn't just dip your hand in that. You wouldn't have much of a hand in a second.

He stared at his hand. Pink and perfect and dry. H-how?

Emboldened, he felt his orange hair with that hand again. His hair was now dry.

He laughed. No acid. No burns. No easily melted flesh. No sizzling, destroyed internal organs. Nothing. Nothing! He was alive!

"Hahaha . . . hahaha . . . I'm alive! Hahahahahahahahaha!"

However it happened, whatever happened, it wasn't going to kill him. It wasn't even hurting him the way it should.

"Wally!"

And then his Uncle Barry rushed to help him. Wally knew he was rushing because, his lab coated uncle seemed to cross the first 50 of the sixty feet between them impossibly fast, like a blur. But then, almost like the whole time slowing down thing, once again, he seemed to be able to see his uncle at normal speed even though he didn't seem to have slowed down.

Wally stared at frantic Uncle Barry.

"How did . . ?"

"Wally! Are you okay?"

Wally paused. He felt like laughing again. Okay? Okay? He felt fantastic!

Only with great effort did he control the euphoria of having lived through that and how he felt.

Then he noticed. His uncle was looking at him so oddly.

"Oh god, the chem spill aid set is still in my car from the Monsanto case. Stay here, Wally! I'll be right back!"

And with that, his lab coated uncle left that room, again moving bizarrely fast.

Wally ran after him. "Uncle Barry! I'm not hurt. I feel . . great."

And he did. He felt so impossibly energized that when he saw his uncle leaving the room ridiculously fast he thought nothing of running after him. So he did. He followed behind his uncle as he went out the lab, down the hall, down 6 flights of stairs from the 4th floor lab to basement level 2 of the police headquarters garage and halfway down the garage to his car, gaining on his uncle all the way and stopping beside him at the trunk of his sedan, his tattered clothes almost falling off now.

His uncle was opening the trunk of his car and suddenly stopped at the sight of his nephew beside him.

" . . . Wally . . ?"

"I-I feel fine, Uncle Barry. But . . . how . . . how did you do that? You . . . you can't do that. How . . . ?"

And then it hit him.

Who could do that?

And how does Uncle Barry know that he can get Flash to show up to meet me? Why was he so certain?

He felt unsteady on his feet a moment. It was like a second lightning bolt striking him.

Uncle Barry is . . . !

He tilted his head to the side almost as though he had to physically look at his uncle in a different way, too, now.

"You're . . . him, aren't you?" he demanded in a whisper.

"Wally, I . . . "

He could see that it made his uncle very nervous.

"I'll never tell Uncle Barry. Never. But that's how you could do that, run down those stairs like that, isn't it?"

His uncle removed a box from the trunk. After closing the trunk, he faced Wally and solemnly nodded. Yes.

"But . . how could you?" he asked his nephew.

Wally's mouth fell open in shock. Oh, yeah.


	4. An evil symbiote worse than spandex

Author's note-This is very long. Sorry. It has to be.

===KF===KF===KF===

"I'll never tell Uncle Barry. Never. But that's how you could do that, run down those stairs like that, isn't it?"

His uncle removed a box from the trunk. After closing the trunk, he faced Wally and solemnly nodded. Yes.

"But . . how could you?" he asked his nephew.

Wally's mouth fell open in shock. Oh, yeah.

He looked down at himself. His already tattered clothes were a lot worse for the wear after his sprinting after his uncle. Uncle Boring . . the Flash. He almost lost his balance there in the garage just thinking about it. Staggering slightly had made him look down. And when he did he saw his new dimensions only partly obscured by the melted zipper of his pants. He marveled at that. Freaking melted! And I'm . . . ! His eyes went wide.

He moved his hips ever so slightly, so that . . it . . swayed.

It'strue!Ohmygod!Iloveyou,lightningbolt!

He immediately started going through the calculation for the volume of a cylinder. Pi, D squared over 4 times quantity times L. If L is . . 50 percent greater than it was five minutes minutes ago, which was already a bigger L than Chan or any of the other guys, and D is . . . He looked again. Awesome! If D is also 50 percent greater than five minutes ago, then I'm . . two point two five and then another gives . . . three point three seven five times as big by volume as I was before. Iloveyou,lightningbolt!

" . . and race back up to the lab with me."

"Huh?"

"Wally! I said I want to see if that wasn't some sort of fluke, so try and race back up to the lab with me. You can't stay here anyway. Your clothes are falling to pieces. Look at you. The seat of your pants split wide open. You're not decent front or back. Now, try and stay with me."

Uncle Barry took off. This time, Wally concentrated and Uncle Barry's movements never seemed to blur. But Wally knew he was going astoundingly fast. Yet Wally stayed right behind him to the end of the parking garage, up six flights of stairs and then down the hallways back to the Science Lab. If the stairs or hallways had been wider, Wally could have passed him. He ran just as fast as his uncle.

Inside the lab, Uncle Barry went straight to the small room, off the main lab room. Once inside, he closed the door behind him, told Wally to "Hold on just a minute!" and stroked his jaw with the thumb and index finger of one hand, deep in thought. Wally was grinning, euphoric. He not only hadn't died, he was as fast as his uncle who, incredibly, turned out to be the Flash. And just running, just using this new speed felt . . great. It felt great. And, somehow, he was four or five inches taller. He could see the difference standing next to Uncle Barry. He not only wasn't dead, he was taller, too!

Itotallycompletelyloveyou,lightningbolt!

He was just aware enough of anything outside of how great he felt to notice his uncle's still deeply pensive expression. He composed himself thinking of what must be concerning him.

"I-I meant what I said, Uncle Barry. I'll never tell. I swear."

"Huh?"

"I . . I said that I'll never tell about . . about you, if-if that's what you're worried about."

"Thanks, but I'm thinking about you, Wally. Twice in the same location, the same . . .," his uncle's voice trailed off. He seemed to have a lot on his mind and fell back into his own thoughts before finally looking up from the floor of the room to Wally and telling him to remove his tattered clothes. He wanted to run some tests on them.

Before he could, steps were heard approaching rapidly from the hallway and Uncle Barry zipped out into the main room of the lab. Wally peeked his head around the doorway to see what this was. A tall, tubby uniformed cop waddled into the lab.

"You okay, Allen? We heard the thunder 'n that loud frigging bang and one of the guys in a squad car outside said it hit your window. Oh, shit, it did!"

He saw the destroyed window and went over to that side of the lab gawking at the broken glass and destroyed shelves. "Holy shit," he muttered before turning back to Uncle Barry. "Are you okay? And wasn't there some kid relative of yours here?"

Wally waved from the doorway of the side room, just poking his head and his less destroyed left arm of his sweater around the corner. "Hi, officer!"

"My nephew, Wally," said Uncle Barry as Wally retreated out of sight. "He almost got hit. Unfortunately, my samples of white phosphorus, fluorosulfuric acid, trfluoromethanesulfonic acid and fluoroantimonic acid weren't so lucky. Have I ever told you about the properties of fluoroantimonic acid, officer Kurowski? It's quite remarkable. You see . .

. . (a minute of dense jargon) . .

. . (another minute of dense jargon) . .

. . which are the properties that make it one of the most powerful acids there is."

Two minutes of sophisticated science monologue had nearly driven the policeman from the room. But he was only approaching the doorway. Uncle Barry continued.

"Now, I'm not a fulminologist but that particular lightning bolt was likely a positively charged bolt. Positively charged bolts can have electric currents of, oh, as much as 300 kiloamperes, around 10 times as much as negatively charged bolts which only carry approximately 30 kiloamperes. Would you like to try help me figure out how many coulombs of electrical charge and how many megajoules of energy may have been associated with that particular bolt, Kurowski?"

The officer sighed and shook his head. "As-as long as everybody's okay, I . . " the officer didn't finish and just waved and waddled out as quickly as he could. Wally gave Uncle Barry a squinting look of appraisal. Hmm. He knows how to his fog of science talk to get rid of people, too. It's not just a totally uncontrollable thing for him.

"Don't worry, officer. I'll call maintenance," Uncle Barry called out to the hall after him then zipped back to Wally in the storage room and shut the door. Wally pulled off his destroyed clothes at super speed, not because there was any need to strip that fast but because he was curious about doing things at super speed. It didn't bother Uncle Barry, who produced a transparent evidence bag from one side of the room and set about collecting his nephew's clothes, inspecting them and making notes. Wally would have felt a bit insecure about being naked but his Uncle didn't seem like he could care less. He was totally absorbed in staring at the ruins of his nephew's clothes, holding one tattered piece of cloth after another up next to his eyes and muttering, repeatedly under his breath "Fascinating! An excrescence of white phosphorus and . . . " and " . . odd, the hydrocarbons clearly protonated, and yet . . . "

Wally shook his head looking over his shoulder at his uncle writing page after page of densely scientific notes at super speed. He turned to the glass fronted bookcase facing him. All the volumes within were dark making the glass as reflective as a mirror.

He stared at himself, the new himself, Wally 2.0, new and improved with super speed! One of his first impressions was that, the way he looked, you could almost tell that he had super speed at a glance. For one thing, it looked like every ounce of fat had been burnt off him. Every muscle seemed to show clearly under his skin. There was a poster at the back of Mrs. Tanner's room. It was a drawing of a man with his skin and fat removed so that the lines and striations of every muscle could be shown in a deep pink with labels. Latissimus Dorsi. Pectoralis Major. Gluteus Minor. There was a tasteful white circle between his legs, putatively to allow for labels of muscles of the upper thigh and lower abdomen. Sixth grade boys and girls knew better. "Chartman", the kids called him. Wally thought he looked like Chartman with pale perfect skin, only much skinnier and much more athletic.

Oh man, wait till those stupid 8th graders try and pick on me and Chan and the guys! I'll-I'll hit 'em a hundred times before they can hit me once. No more being picked on for being a nerd or poor or anything else! Not me, not anybody at school. Not the way I am now.

He gave a contented slow exhale at this thought and examined himself a little more closely. He was definitely taller, maybe four inches and it all seemed to be in his legs. But his waist definitely seemed narrower, his hips too. He put his hands to his sides almost trying to measure and concluded that he was definitely slimmer. It made him seem both skinnier and taller than even just the four inch increase in height he'd, amazingly had.

He looked at his hands. They were definitely larger. This seemed good. But his wrists actually seemed smaller, as did his forearms. He frowned. He'd only been able to get a draw at arm wrestling with wimpy little Aaron, over at Stevie's house last week and now his forearms looked even less impressive somehow. Ugh.

He sighed but kept up his personal survey. His shoulders had more muscle and even if his chest didn't, and those upper back ones at your sides, the lats, they looked bigger so that, with his even smaller waist, he had a V shape to his upper body. He smiled. His abs were fantastic, too. Not a drop of fat. Eight squares showing without him flexing at all.

While still looking down at his abs he noticed the reflection of his face out of the corner of his eye. It was him and yet . . . even his face was slightly different. He was anything but a big round pie face like Stevie. Bbut along with his jaw looking slightly larger; he held it in one hand, his features seemed more distinct in general. He was still clearly Wally, but a changed Wally. No fat anywhere. He thought of this and flexed his leg muscles. He could see them beneath his skin. His calves were incredible. His thighs not thicker but certainly stronger just the same. And he reached for his backside. No fat even there, but damn.

He turned partly sideways toward the mirror. Ohmy- . . And then quickly back raising an eyebrow.

How can I only be . . ., he put his hands to his sides facing the mirror again measuring the width of his hips. Now he turned sideways to the reflecting glass again.

And yet my . . .

He shrugged. He could barely wear the hand me down chinos he got from Chan before. Now? But, it was part of having speed, of being a speedster, wasn't it? It made sense. If you're going to run super fast, your legs should look at least a bit more like you-like you . . can run super fast, shouldn't they?

And right now he wanted to run. He felt almost overflowing with energy. He hopped back and forth like a fighter in the boxing ring ready for a match, only at high speed. He threw practice jabs. Take that, stupid ass 8th graders! And 50 more! And 50 more! He gradually stopped and smirked at . . it swinging back and forth. Definitely need a supporter or shorts or something here.

He turned back to his Uncle, still busily writing notes, the messy stack of them on a table in the corner now 20 sheets deep.

"Uncle Barry. I-I want to run some more. Do you have something I could w-"

"Just a minute, Wally!" Uncle Barry raised one finger. He wrote one more page of high speed notes and then gathered them all and zipped out of the storage room to his desk in the main room where he stored them in a locked drawer. He zipped back with that odd metal ring thing with the three cameras that he'd used before.

"Come here," he gestured for Wally to stand right in front of him. "This is something I loaned from J'onn J'onzz. It's a top of the line martian somavision."

" A what?"

Uncle Barry didn't reply but held the ring over Wally's head. Again, three narrow metal legs somehow projected out from each camera down to the ground and Uncle Barry let the ring go. It dropped to the ground and like the last time Wally felt a slight tingle. Uncle Barry had him step over it then zipped back to the other room and Wally peeked around the corner at his uncle attaching what looked like a memory stick to one of the cameras and then zipping back to him.

"I guess you could think of it as a sort of MRI machine only orders of magnitude better."

"So . . now you have pictures of me with that thing both before and after I became fast."

Uncle Barry nodded.

"Wait! Did you know I'd get hit by lightning and become . . ?"

Uncle Barry shook his head. "Of course not. I was just loaning it from Martian Manhunter. I thought I'd give you a sort of precautionary MRI and make sure you didn't have any unseen medical conditions. But now I can compare how you were before and after. I can't tell you how many fascinating lines of enquiry this opens up, Wally. For instance, you're obviously taller. Did the speedforce accelerate your puberty in every way and how did that affect various other functions including your endocrine system and your-"

"Speed . . force?" Wally squinted skeptically.

"Well, yes. That's what I call the energy that seems to power my speed and that you appear to have also tapped into. You see it's an interdimensional energy transfer of-"

Wally held up one hand. He sensed the onset of one of Uncle Barry's science monologues.

"Uncle Barry. I-I want to run. Do you have anything that I could wear?"

His uncle smiled. "Not really, nothing normal . . you'd burn that stuff up, anyway, if you tried to run in it. But I do have something."

Wally was intrigued by his smile. His uncle zipped out of the room and returned holding up a gold colored ring.

"Here," he said tossing it to his nephew. "I've always got a couple spare uniforms."

"There's a . . Flash uniform in . . this?" Wally couldn't believe it.

Uncle Barry nodded. "You work it like this," he said holding his own hand out which not coincidentally had an exact duplicate of that ring on it. "You press the side here and then the face, right on the lightning bolt and that primes the release of the uniform. Then you take your finger off the lightning bolt and the uniform pops out."

"I get to wear a . . a Flash uniform?" Wally asked, both brows raised.

His uncle nodded proudly. "Now, we'll let out the unforms at the same time and you just put yours on the same way I do mine. Ready? One-"

"Wait!" Wally held out a hand in a stop sign gesture and squinted quizzically again. "Won't your uniform be way too big for me?"

Uncle Barry only smiled. "Don't worry. Okay, on three. One . . two . . three!"

Wally worked the ring the same way Uncle Barry did. Red Flash uniforms burst forth from both rings expanding rapidly. Wally grabbed the one from his ring out of the air and pulled everything on the same way as Uncle Barry did. But it was weird. First of all, there was the freaky supporter. And then there was the way you had to get into the suit, stretching the opening at the head wide and pulling it on that way. It was all one piece with no zippers or buttons or flaps or anything.

At first, it was a bit large for him, but not as much as Wally expected. Uncle Barry was six foot one and change. It should have been looser even at first. But maybe Uncle Barry had to stretch it some to get into his uniform.

But then it seemed to shrink enough to fit him just right. Only it didn't stop there. The damn suit kept shrinking and shrinking. Wally had it all on, the boots and gloves, too. There was Flash beside him, Uncle Barry the Flash. But his suit kept shrinking and shrinking.

He arched his back forward then backward. "Oh my god," he groaned now lifting one leg then the other.

"What's the matter?" asked his uncle nervously.

Wally did a sort of impromptu set of tai chi exercises trying to desperately separate his skin, some of his skin, any of it, from the damn suit but no matter how he flexed or stretched or bent himself it stuck to the surface of his body.

"This suit . . I think it's an evil symbiote!"

"A what?" his uncle laughed.

Wally tried one last burst of super speed motions, almost frantic dancing, to try and separate the suit from his skin. Finally his uncle grabbed his arm.

"What are you doing?"

"I think it might be an evil symbiote." He tried to tug at the chest of the suit but could just barely get a hold of it and as soon as he let go it snapped back to attach to his skin. "My friend Jeff has all these old comics that his father bought for him and in the old Spiderman comics, the-the carnage thing that takes people over started as this stuff that Spiderman was using as his suit. It would just attach to him," he said and then looked down in horror at how the uniform fit him. "Though probably nowhere near this tight."

"An evil symbiote, huh?" Uncle Barry arched one blond eyebrow.

Wally nodded.

Uncle Barry sighed. "Those are just comic books. This is real life. The uniform is made out of a material that I invented. You know J'onn J'onzz was really impressed by it."

"He didn't have to wear it."

"Come on now."

"Uncle Barry. I feel like I'm naked but colored red."

His uncle held up one hand and had a stern look on his face. "When I'm in uniform, you must never call me anything but 'Flash'. Do you understand? That's incredibly important. To protect my secret identity no one can have any clues as to who I really am. Do you understand?"

Wally nodded his now red masked head adorned with a wing on each side.

"Now what should you be called? I can't call you 'Wally' if you have a uniform on."

Wally stood there a moment, lips pursed. "Mmm . . how 'bout Flash junior!"

Flash nodded. "Okay. Flash junior! Now let's run."

Flash junior shooked his head at super speed and retreated a step toward one wall.

"I can't go out in public like this! This is a thousand times worse than spandex! What if someone sees me?"

"Come on, Flash junior."

"And what's with the weird supporter with only one strap?" he demanded and glancing down now saw the incredibly prominent red bulge at his crotch. He blushed nearly as red as his uniform and then his head hung limply to one side. "Oh my god. I look ridiculous," he muttered.

"Flash junior! You do not look ridiculous. You look terrific. You have a wonderful ecto-mesomorphic physique suggestive of your speed. But the bottom line is that you have to wear that suit to use your speed. It's designed to conform absolutely to the surface of your body without ever wrinkling or bagging so that friction is absolutely minimized. It doesn't feel tight or restricting, does it?"

Flash junior sighed and faced his reflection in the glass fronted bookcase on that side of the room. "No," he reluctantly muttered, not cheered at all by this as stared at the way the red suit revealed every square inch of him.

"If you were somehow able to squeeze a dime under this uniform people would be able to read the words on it and see what year it was minted," he complained over his shoulder.

"I don't see what you're so worried about, Flash junior. You look terrific and, besides, you're wearing a mask. No one knows it's you."

Flash junior stared at the reflection of his face. There was something to that. When he looked at his reflection, it was both him and not him at the same time. Still, the suit showed every muscle of his body, every square inch of him. This was worse than the white tights that ballet dude from last Fridays' culture Friday had to wear. At least he got to wear a loose velour or whatever it was top. And then contemplating how he was even worse off than a ballet dancer, one final horror occurred to Flash junior. He spun and looked frantically down over his shoulder.

"Oh, pffew!" he exhaled.

"What is it?" asked Flash.

"I thought maybe the suit had a seam in the back or something where it was like ballet tights."

"Nope. Now, come on, Flash junior. You wanted to run. Let's run. Let's see what you can do," said Flash taking a step toward the doorway.

Flash junior didn't move. His disconsolate gaze drifted downward.

"I look like I'm smuggling a mango into the country or something."

"You look like a very . . . masculine young man. It suggests great fecundity."

Wally sighed. His head hung limply to one side. Great fecundity? Reassurance from Uncle Boring. God.

And then another thought occured to him. He took a long look at Flash who was just standing by the door now obviously hoping to wait out a change of heart. He always looks great. Is Flash's uniform this tight? And to his surprise, he realized it was. His uniform was just as ridiculously, insanely tighter than skin tight tight. Why hadn't he ever really picked up on that with all the pictures of Flash he'd saved?

He even craned his head a little and looked at Flash's rear. He imagined Stevie's voice in his head shouting "Gay thought! Checking your uncle out! Gay thought!". But defended himself that he was just trying to figure out if his uniform was the same. And it was. And he further defended himself that his thoughts were clearly not gay because he had never quite realized how tight Flash's uniform is. It had always seemed perfectly natural because Flash looked, well . . perfect. His uniform being super ridiculously tight didn't really matter.

He sighed, drawing at least some strength from this. Maybe when I'm older it won't seem so embarassing.

He took a deep breath and walked over next to Flash at the door and gave a slight nod. I'm ready.

Flash beamed.

"Okay, Flash junior. Now, first of all, before we run, I want you to learn maybe the most important Flash trick or speedster trick there is."

"What's that?"

"Vibrating your molecules. When you approach an object at 500 miles per hour or faster, it's very cumbersome to have to stop at a doorway and twist the nob then pull it open et cetera. It's much more fluid to vibrate your molecules and pass through a wall."

"That's how you do it?"

Flash nodded. In the next few minutes he gave his protege a quick tutorial in super speed vibration. To his delight, Flash junior quickly picked up on it. Before they ran out, Flash junior did it one more time, facing he reflecting bookcase glass and flexing his ab muscles as Flash had instructed, setting up vibrations throughout his body till his reflection became faint and the poster on the opposite wall could be seen right through him.

He stopped and got a pat on the back from Flash. "Good work. Afterward, I'll show you how to start vibrations from a tap from your hand for when that's more convenient and eventually how to isolate vibrations."

Flash junior smiled. The suit was heinous but this was cool.

They zipped over to Flash's desk. He opened one drawer and rather than finding pens and notebooks and post it pads, the entire drawer was filled with trail mix. Flash munched one big handful and so did Flash junior. That felt great. He hadn't realized just how incredibly hungry he'd been, so focused was he on things. He grabbed a second handful and then long gulps from the water fountain in one corner of the lab. Then he followed Flash out of the lab, down the stairs to the garage and then out the garage to the streets of Keystone City staying just behind him to one side all the way. Flash got out to the interstate running through Keystone City and stopped in the breakdown lane.

It being Keystone City where everyone loved the Flash, they all waved. When the two speedsters briefly stopped in the breakdown lane, Flash waved back. Flash junior also reluctantly waved. They didn't shout back to the citizens even though everyone was yelling "Hi, Flash!" and "Great to see you, Flash!". Of course, there were also a few people asking, "Who's the little one?"

They ignored them and Flash turned to Flash junior. "Okay, this is your show now. Stay on the interstate for simplicity. But run as far and as fast as you want."

Flash junior grinned. He started slow with a few loping strides and then broke into a sprint. "Boom coming!" he heard Flash shout from just off his shoulder and he remembered to vibrate his molecules as they approached the speed of sound to avoid upsetting people with a sonic boom. With all his experience, Flash knew almost exactly how fast they were running at one point in time.

Flash junior got over the speed of sound, then slowed back down, vibrating his molecules, again, when he was slowing to under it to avoid a boom again and then stopped in the breakdown lane in the suburbs outside Keystone City.

Flash watched him closely to be sure he was okay. Flash junior was looking at himself with a sort of hesitant smile.

"Are you okay?"

Flash junior almost laughed. Okay? Okay? That was fucking awesome! He took off again, much faster this time, vibrating again as he approached the sound barrier. Barrier? Ha! It was nothing! It was like putting a piece of wrapping paper up in front of a bullet train. Barrier? He really poured it on now, sprinting as hard as he could on long fluid strides. It was easy. It was wonderful. The energy just flowed into him. There wasn't any particular effort to it. And when finally he stopped, somewhere in the midwest, Flash was a half second back of him and found his nephew laughing out loud when he got there.

He grinned.

"It's terrific, isn't it?" he asked softly.

Flash junior nodded and looked back in the direction from which they'd come in wonder. "I-I just made half the country look like nothing! Hills, mountains, valleys, plains . . . nothing!" He held his arms out in front of him and looked at them then grinned at his uncle. "It's . . . "

He couldn't finish the thought and didn't have to.

Flash knew that feeling. He gave Flash junior a hug. At last someone shared his secret. Even Iris didn't really know. He could tell her what it was like but words couldn't explain what this power felt like. It was so incredible. Such a joy just to use it. His nephew knew. And his nephew's speed surprised him. He didn't think a 12 year old would be able to run that close to his own top speed.

Flash junior looked at him with a grin. His uncle knew what was coming.

"Race you back!" his protege shouted.

"Only to the state line!" Flash just barely got off before Flash junior took off, this time running even faster, setting a blistering pace even for a speedster back east along the interstates though going off it at one point, using a gently curving off ramp and an access road to get to a large lake that he ran across laughing most of the way. Finally, they coasted, in Flash terms, running just a few hundred miles per hour then the pace of a mere olympic track star till finally halting by the sign for the state line near Keystone City.

"You are so fast!" Flash praised. Flash junior grinned ear to ear.

Cars went by beeping and waving at Flash and both speedsters could see people asking who the other one was.

Flash patted Flash junior's shoulder. "I want to help you learn to master your abilities and later, maybe when you're fifteen or probably sixteen, you'll be ready to fight crime like a regular super hero."

Flash junior was crestfallen. "Six-teen? But I'm already-"

He stopped. The ring was vibrating in pairs of mild zaps against his skin. Zzzt!Zzzt!

He'd had to put it on his thumb because it was much too large for his fingers. But it was safely under his red glove.

Zzzt!Zzzt!

He turned to Flash and saw that his uncle now looked worried. "Flash my ring's zapping me."

Flash nodded. "Two zaps at a time. That's a call from Keystone City Police. You stay here. I'll be back," he commanded and with that he sped off toward Keystone City on the horizon.

Flash junior paused only a split second. He shook his head.

No.

No!

No effing way!

I'm-I'm one, too! I'm not gonna just sit here. He saw a girl his age in the passenger side of a pickup truck in the nearest lane smirking at him. He glanced down. The uniform! Oh, screw it. I don't care right now.

He sprinted off. He wasn't sure were Flash was going but remembered that the signal on the ring had meant a call from Keystone police, so he started back toward that part of the city. But before he got close he saw Flash speeding away from police headquarters and when he followed him over a hill he could see an entire housing complex of six buildings on fire just beyond, flames whipping back and forth from half the windows and rising high into the early evening sky from roofs. He ran harder and caught up to Flash.

"What are you doing here?" shouted Flash with more than a little anger as he came to a stop on the street outside the buildings. "I told you to wait!"

"I'm here to help, not wait!" Flash junior shouted back because he had to to be heard over the flames and shouts and sirens.

"Iris is gonna kill me!" his nephew heard Flash mutter before turning to him. "Okay, this is a rescue job. Save everyone you can but don't get yourself killed. And don't make things worse. Vibrate into every room. Don't open doors! Opening doors feeds the fire!"

Flash junior nodded and when Flash sped off into the nearest building to the right he went into the one to the left. The front door had been open but each floor of the eight story building was rectangular with a main hallway running down the long dimension center of it. An unshaven, barefoot man in dirty pants and a wife beater stumbled past him as flames hissed from several of the doors.

"Get da fuck out while you can!" he slurred. Flash junior could smell the alcohol on him before he reached him. The man looked at the pre-teen boy in skin tight red suddenly noticing what the person he'd warned actually looked like. "What the fu-?" he stumbled and then got up and went out the front door.

Flash junior took a deep breath. Okay. This is the real thing now, not just a comic book. He sprinted for the nearest door hoping he'd get this right and not knock himself out like a complete idiot running into a door while wearing the tightest outfit in the history of mankind. And in a fraction of a second he was inside. He'd vibrated through the door like Flash had taught him. He couldn't help but smile while he looked around the apartment. It was a bit messy. It was just a cheap apartment and it was empty. He sped back out vibrating through again, down to the next one where he vibrated in. There were two kids inside this one, one toddler boy another maybe four years old. They were asleep. He looked around to make sure they were the only ones then picked them up. Suddenly he stopped.

This was another challenge, vibrating other people. Flash said he needed to establish is own vibrations at a rate greater than necessary and then tap that person and that would give them a slightly lesser rate of vibration.

He exhaled. He vibrated himself at a much greater rate than had got him through the door and tapped each boy with one hand then ran for the door.

And then he was through and in a fraction of a second out at the street where he zipped to the side of an older couple looking on at the scene. "Look after these boys, please!" he shouted over the fire and sirens and then went back into the building. He rescued people from two of the six buildings. Flash saved everyone from four of them. Room after room, he sped at the door and vibrated his way in, negotiating all the burning junk in every little apartment to save 13 people from likely death. One woman was too big for him to carry so he ran to Flash and got him to carry her out. By the time there was only the got to the top floor of the second buiding left to check, flames had engulfed both emergency stairways and there was no way up. He'd barely gotten two eight year old girls down and out of their from the floor next to the top before the stairway had started collapsing. But he had to go up there.

There was a crowd of onlookers now and there was a nicaraguan woman near the edge of the crowd frantically shouting into a phone. It seemed that her brother was supposed to have gotten her son out of there but he was somewhere on the other side of the complex and didn't have her son with him. The woman was frantic.

"My little Alberto!" she pleaded, pushing past a soot stained couple at the edge of the crowd to Flash junior who had gotten a bottle of water from a woman and was bent over catching his breath as well as trying to rehydrate.

"You are a-a hero?" she asked with a spanish accent, looking somewhat skeptical of the boy only her height.

He nodded. "I'm-I'm a Flash."

"Madre de Dio! You have to save my Alberto! He's still in there!" There followed a series of curses in spanish directed toward her brother. "Please can you get him? Please!" she beseeched him.

"Where is he?" asked Flash junior.

She pointed to the top of the second building. "Diez treinta y dos, um, ten thirty two!"

He groaned. The top floor. There was no way up there. And no way back down.

He looked at her. She cried, "Alberto!" and fell to her knees.

He took a deep breath. He felt tired now. The feeling had come on part way through his rescuing people from the second building. But he had to try. He wasn't sure if he could do the trick he had in mind but what else could he do? He sprinted away from the onlookers and ran for when corner of the building then ran straight up the brick side of the building itself. He wasn't sure he could vibrate his molecules at the same time as running so hard as to go up the side of the building now but didn't have to. There was an open window. He dove in and slammed into a bureau and dresser just beyond it. He cursed. That really hurt. He'd hit them while still going fast. He would have gotten to his feet but the room was filled with smoke above his waist level. It was billowing out the window, that's how he'd seen it was open.

But this was 1032. Every floor of the building had the same layout. He crawled at high speed into the next room. It was a children's bedroom. But there was no Alberto. Flash junior sped on all fours to the living room. "Alberto!" he shouted at the top of his lungs and listened for a sound above the roaring fire and blaring sirens. He thought he heard something. "Alberto!" he shouted, again.

"Si," he heard faintly from one side. He looked that way. There was a closet door. He sped to it and yanked it open. At the same time as a four year old boy jumped into his arms, flames roared forward and the two of them were thrown into the middle of the room by a wave of hot air.

Flash junior gathered himself and the frightened boy. Flames engulfed what had been only a smoke filled room. They must've been coming up through the closet but hadn't been able to flow freely till he'd opened the door. He grabbed Alberto and crawled to the next room. He slammed the bedroom door shut against the air pressure and then tried a Flash trick he'd seen on TV. He spun his arm in a circle. The cyclone effect wasn't nearly as good as he'd hoped but it fanned the smoke out of the room for the moment. He stood up.

Alberto said something to him in spanish that Flash junior didn't understand. But he understood the feeling behind it. He saw the boy look fearfully at the flame filled room behind them and gave him a reassuring pat on the head. He picked up Alberto and went to the window.

Okay, he said to himself, how do you do this? He looked down. Ten stories. That's a lot of fall.

And as he was trying to figure how they'd get down, the ceiling above them partially collapsed. The roof above him had been so completely engulfed in flames that it had collapsed into the bedroom where he and Alberto were. One piece of debris grazed his head just in front of his left ear wing. Some other debris bounced off the bed and hit him in the back.

"Ow! Guess we've gotta go now, huh, amigo?" he said rubbing his head and his back and pushing toward the window. Hesitantly, he went out the window, feet first. He could hear the crowd below scream thinking someone was going to jump. But he wasn't going to jump. He didn't have any special power for jumping. He got his waist out and then all but one arm with Alberto in the other and got his boots against the brick side of the building. At the same time, he let go and started running. Instead of running straight down, he ran diagonally from the top left to the bottom right of the brick building as viewed by all the onlookers. He wasn't sure exactly what he'd do at the bottom but managed to only half stumble and keep striding when he reached ground and zoom past the complex three blocks up the street before zooming back and delivering little Alberto into the crying woman's arms as the crowd cheered.

He spent a couple minutes in her arms as well. She hugged him and hugged him and didn't seem to want to let go of him, at least until a guy Flash junior guessed was her brother arrived, at which time she assailed him and beat him about the head and shoulders for a solid minute. He laughed. Everything was okay. Flash had saved another 17 people and though the buildings burned for another three hours there was no risk of anyone dying.

He was completely tired. He'd never been so tired in his life. But he'd never felt so wonderful inside. He had saved 13 people. He was a hero. After a few minutes, Flash zipped to his side and gave him a pat on the back as grateful parents surrounded them, thanking them both profusely as the occasional fireman went by.

Then, just 50 feet away, a white van with blue lettering screeched to a halt at the curb. At first it stopped on top of one of the several fire hose lines that criss crossed the street and the charred debris strewn lawn in front of the buildings. Wally noticed that it had a sort of mini satellite dish on top and bright blue lettering that said "Action 7 News!" The exclamation point was pretty clearly implied.

A fireman shouted, "Hey, move that fucking van!"and the van inched forward a few feet. The second it did, a young woman in a short red dress jumped out of the passenger side and nearly ran toward him and Flash.

Wally quickly realized that she had a Bluetooth insert in one ear.

"Like the saying goes, Steve," she said to no visible Steve. "If it bleeds it leads,and if there's a Meta, that's even betta!"

And then, still several steps away from the speedsters, she muttered. "And two Metas is even betta. Who's the little one, Steve? Have we got any intel on the boy one?"

Wally looked at Flash with a frown. Flash gave him a stern look. "Control yourself . . . Flash junior. We have to always be courteous with the press. It's very important to project the best image to the public so that they hold us heroes in high esteem. Now, be on your best behavior."

Wally nodded. Then he looked down and saw, again, how incredibly revealing this red uniform was. God! Naked plus red coloring on television. He tugged Flash's arm urgently. "Couldn't we just speed away from here? They'd-they'd think we got another call or something."

Flash patted his shoulder. "Come on now," he reproached his new speedster protégé. "There are certain obligations that go with this job. We just have to deal with them."

Wally sighed and very reluctantly nodded agreement.

"Nothing? Ever? No one's ever seen another Flash? Are you sure? Oh my god, an exclusive!" the woman in the short red dress was saying excitedly into her bluetooth as she neared the two speedsters. She seemed just about to flash bleached white teeth and offer a perky greeting when she collided with a fireman, but not just any fireman, the Keystone City fire chief.

She was apologetic. The chief couldn't stop and talk, he had to check that the lremnants of the fire were put out. "Why don't you talk to Flash and the, uh, kid Flash, first," he said gesturing toward the two red clad speedsters.

She nodded and continued her beeline straight for them. "Flash . . Kid Flash," she offered a handshake greeting. "Cindy Summers from Action 7 news."

"Good evening, Miss Summers," offered Flash.

Wally sputtered. Kid? "It's-it's Flash junior," he said as he shook hands with her trying to imitate Flash's deeper voice.

She nodded, a grin growing and growing. "Aren't you just the cutest boy ever!" She tugged at one of his ear wings.

Wally sighed. No one went off on this cute stuff with Flash.

"The guys in the van can't seem to find any record of Kid Flash-"

"Flash Junior!"

"Kid, um, . . Junior, before this. Was this your first mission?"

Wally nodded.

Cindy Summers did a victory dance finished by a fist pump and a shout of "Exclusive!"

Wally glanced up at Flash. And then quickly off into the distance. We could still speed away.

Flash gave a stern look back.

Wally sighed.

The next couple minutes were spent setting up the live shot. A guy carrying a camera on his shoulder and another guy had come out of the van after Cindy. They were all talking to each other on bluetooth and there was a sort of stereo effect set up where Wally could hear even nearly whispered comments from them because the voice was coming out of three earpieces around them.

Wally was getting increasingly nervous having to just stand there in his tighter than skin tight Flash suit with people standing there staring at him. The only consolation was the mask. Somehow wearing the mask made what would have been death inducing embarassment at being seen in public like this bearable instead. Still, they were walking around him and staring. At one point, he heard, out of three headsets Cindy Summers' hushed voice from behind him, "Oh. My. God. What a tush on this kid!"

Wally tried one last desperation glance to Flash. We could . . But he got only a stern look back.

Just moments later, the third guy, who seemed to be some sort of director was waving people away from the area, Cindy Summers was sidling up next to him and a light went on on the camera. It turned out they were sending pictures back to the Action 7 studios as a check.

"How's that, Fred?" said the cameraman though the other guy seemed to be a Brian.

"Jesus, can he adjust himself or something? Too explicit."

"Can you, um, adjust yourself?" asked Cindy Summers.

" . . ."

"Below your waist. It's . . a bit much."

". . ."

"We broadcast in family hours."

"I can't make myself smaller. The-the suit is just . . . it's not possible."

"He says the package doesn't get smaller," she whispered into her bluetooth.

"Okay, we start with a wide shot and then we shoot waist up!" came a voice out of three different headsets. "Thirty seconds people they're in commercial and then they'll throw it out here."

Wally exhaled, trying to relax himself. He brushed some soot off his shoulder and then brushed at the top of his uniform when he realized, to his horror, that when the debris from the roof above 1032 had hit him it had torn his uniform. He could feel that his orange hair was partly showing out of the tear.

A man with a camera and a man holding a light suddenly appeared in front of them and Cindy Summers adjusted her bluetooth to be less visible just as someone else handed her a microphone.

A red light went on atop the camera.

"That's right, Bob," said Cindy to no visible Bob. "Earlier this evening, all six buildings of the Wilson-Roosevelt public housing complex were engulfed in flames. According to Chief Clancy, the origin of the fire is still under investigation but it's suspicious. What's not suspicious is the way that as many as 50 lives may have been saved this evening. I'm speaking of course, of the efforts of Keystone City's own Flash," she nodded toward Flash to her side. He gave a respectful nod to the camera. "And-and Kid Flash, the newest superhero!" she turned to him.

Extremely quickly, he gave her an angry look and cast a glance to Flash who ever so briefly moderated his expression to sternly warn his nephew.

Wally nodded toward the camera while groaning to himself. Kid Flash? That's so dumb!

"I'm hearing that this was your first mission as a hero, is that right, young man?" she said bending down slightly and adding a saccharine tone to her voice.

"Yes, ma'am," he barely managed.

"What was the situation here, Kid Flash?"

"Well, ma'am. When Flash and I reached the site fire was in progress in all six buildings to varying degrees. We proceeded to do all that we could to evacuate residents and save lives."

"I'm told, that you even saved one boy by running up the side of the building and then climbing out a tenth story window and running down the side of the building. Is that true, Kid Flash?"

He winced slightly. She was reinforcing that stupid name in everyone's minds.

"Yes ma'am. Just-just doing what we can to help."

"And will you be patrolling alongside Flash, fighting crime in Keystone City from now on, Kid Flash?"

"I'll try to help wherever I'm needed, ma'am."

She looked away from him straight into the camera now. "There you have it, Bob. Fire at the Wilson-Roosevelt public housing complex leaves hundreds homelss but things could have been worse if not for the rescue efforts of Flash and Kid Flash. Cindy Summers for Action 7 signing off with the exclusive on Keystone City's newest superhero."

She stood there a few moments apparently trying to display every tooth in her mouth and then the red light over the camera went off.

"Okay, everybody, let's get those follow on interviews! Get Mrs. Ortega and the other guy."

Cindy Summers shook hands with Kid Flash and Flash and rushed away down the sidewalk talking into her bluetooth earpiece again.

"That's right! It'll get picked up everywhere! Exclusive on a new here and a meta at that!"

Just as she was saying this, another van just like the channel 7 van but painted to say, "News 5 with Josh Logan!" pulled up to the curb.

"Suck it, Josh!" Kid Flash thought he heard Cindy say.

He looked up at Flash shaking his head.

"They're not always that bad . . Kid Flash. Come on, we've gotta check in with the Fire Chief."

Kid Flash rolled his eyes. Stuck with that name thanks to Cindy freaking Summers! He followed Flash who zipped around the site till he found the Chief. He asked if the Chief needed their help with anything else. The Chief said he didnt and the two speedsters sprinted away.

Flash led his protege toward the suburb where he and Aunt Iris lived. He stopped at the town line.

"What is it?" asked Kid Flash.

Flash gulped and looked around to make sure no one could hear them. "Now, I have to explain this to your aunt."


	5. Uncle Barry explains to Aunt Iris

"Oh god. Now, I have to explain this to your aunt," muttered Flash, eyes darting anxiously side to side.

Kid Flash couldn't understand why he was so nervous. Maybe anxiety couldn't possibly register with the newly minted speedster right then. He was tired but he also felt a euphoria welling up within him. Even the insanely embarassing body coating of a uniform couldn't stop the feeling. And on the other side of the ledger, he now had a super power and had saved 13 people! He'd saved the lives of 13 people! He was a hero! Him, Wally West!

He looked again at Flash's furrowed brow. It didn't seem to mean anything to him. He grinned. They were standing next to a playground full of empty basketball and tennis courts. He spied a stray basketball. Even tired he felt so incredibly athletic. He'd shocked Chan and the guys a week back by jumping and swatting the net of the basketball hoop at Stevie's house. He could always jump. But, now . . !

He had to try.

He zipped over to the ball under one hoop, dribbled and ran, at a super speedster pace to the hoop at the other side, leaped and slammed the ball home. The dying bounces of the ball coming to rest punctuated his laughter.

I can . . . hahaha! I can dunk! Ahahahahahahahahaha!

"Come on," said Flash waving in the general direction of his and Aunt Iris's home before taking off.

Kid Flash composed himself and ran after him and seconds later, they were sprinting along a trail through the woods behind Uncle Barry and Aunt Iris's home and then vibrating through the back wall of the home into the living room. Once inside, they slowed to a walk. Flash went straight for the bowl of fruit on the counter separating the kitchen from the dining room. The mere sight of food made Kid Flash feel anew just how incredibly hungry he was.

Food!

He watched Flash grab an apple and spin it at hundreds of rpm, eating it down to the core in just a couple seconds. He smirked as he grabbed one for himself and did likewise. He laughed to himself. I can do that, too. I could eat a whole meal in ten seconds. He patted his red clad abs over his stomach. It felt so good to have something in there. His uncle, the Flash, zipped away to his den and Kid Flash heard a computer start up. He chuckled again at the very idea. Uncle Boring is . . . the Flash! Who would have ever guessed?

He stood there a few seconds shaking his head at this. Uncle Barry, the Flash! Then he grabbed another apple from the bowl and buzzsawed through it in 2 seconds. After that, he gulped down a glass of water. Ahhhh.

This super speeding sure made you hungry.

He still grinned with satisfaction as he looked around the familiar interior of Aunt Iris and Uncle Barry's home. He'd been there a dozen times. Only now it looked . . different. He was suddenly almost five inches taller than he'd been just that morning. The rooms and all the furnishings looked a bit smaller. It was like that time that he'd gone inside his old elementary school a year after leaving it. He pondered how different Aunt Iris and Uncle Barry's kitchen and dining room looked to him the way he was now. It felt a bit odd. He had to adjust to it, but he liked it.

It also felt odd to be wearing a Flash suit in Aunt Iris's house. One thing about the suit was that it so perfectly stuck to skin. It didn't squeeze or restrict you. Kid Flash glanced around, as if there could be anyone else there, and then casually dropped to the floor in a full split, front and back. He reversed legs and then even did one with his legs split to the side. He popped back up to his feet with raised eyebrows and a hmmph. Couldn't do that before. And how could this suit be so ridiculously tight and not make it harder to do that?

He pulled at the chest of the uniform with one gloved hand. It was nearly impossible to get it to separate from his skin. He gave a sigh. The thing was, when you wore normal clothes the material was always moving, touching you, not touching you, bagging, wrinkling, whatever. It was always doing something against your skin. The way this suit just stayed there against his skin without doing any of that was oddly like being . . naked. It felt really weird to seem . . naked in Aunt Iris's house. The one place he was safest in all the world was Aunt Iris's house. To feel like this when he was there . . .

He gave a slight shudder then consciously shifted his thoughts to the big picture.

I . . ran to the midwest and back in a minute! Ha! One minute! Wait till Chan . . oh, man! Chan was supposed to be with me! Oh man! If his stupid mother hadn't stopped him from coming with me, Chan could be a Flash now, too! That would've been so cool! The two of us, super speeding! Haha! See how Chan would like wearing this ridiculous uniform! All the kids at school, all the teachers, Mom and Dad and sis, laughing at me and making fun of me, well, who's got the last laugh now, huh? Who's got super speed, huh? Who saved 13 people? Those girls that snicker at me in the halls? Yeah, well I wouldn't go to your stupid parties now even if you invited me! Even if you begged me! A super hero doesn't hang around with dumb girls who make fun of kids just because they're poor.

But, though he still felt some desire to show all those idiots, after an initial burst of enthusiasm he just didn't care that much about showing all those people how wrong they were about him. It felt old and faded, a small revenge gone by, now meaningless compared to other things. He was a hero now!

He remembered that woman hugging him after he'd saved little Alberto. He let out a pleasant sigh.

"I'm Kid Flash," he said softly, trying out the words. "I saved 13 people's lives."

"I'm Kid Flash," he said a little louder, then, in his deepest voice, "I'm Kid Flash, officer. Now, where's that super villain?"

He grinned. I'm Kid Flash!

He looked straight at the reflecting surface of a glass doored kitchen cabinet. "Flash . . ," he said with a double oh 7 pause, "Kid Flash." He imagined a guitar playing the James Bond theme following his words.

Dammit, this would all be perfect coolness if not for . .

He glanced down at the uniform and let out a frustrated sigh. If not for this . . he held his arms out, inspecting how the red uniform stayed perfectly pressed to his skin no matter how he turned his arms. Not leaving even a millimeter of space even on the insides of his elbows. He glanced down at the red bulge of his crotch and rolled his eyes. Oh. My. God. He zipped up to Uncle Barry and Aunt Iris's bedroom. Aunt Iris had one of those three sided mirrors up there, the kind you see in some clothing stores, where you can see how you look front and back without having to turn around.

His feelings of superhero pride plummeted. It wasn't that he didn't like the way he was now. He loved being taller and super conditioned and more muscular in some places. But the suit was just so . . wrong. No one wore anything this tight. Even the girl superheroes didn't wear anything this tight. He was quite sure of that from his . . purely scientificl appraisal of every available picture and video clip of Wonder Girl and Bat Girl.

Even that ballet dude at the culture Friday performance last week at school, even his tights weren't this tight! He remembered he and his friends, the smartest boys in the class, snickering at the ballet dude in his white tights. His head dropped with the realization that his friends would definitely snicker at the sight of him in this suit, too.

After a long sigh to compose himself and a reminder that the suit didn't matter, he was a superhero, he advanced to an inch from the glass inspecting his face. The effect of the mask was fascinating. One moment he was sure everyone would know at a glance that it was him, Wally West. The next, he thought it disguised him well. "I'm Kid Flash," he said to the mirror. Another identity. It didn't quite feel real. He sighed. Maybe he'd get used to it.

Staring at his reflection, his eyes went to the sides of his cowl. He ran the fingers of his right hand along the wing on that side of his head. If there was anything, anything good at all about the uniform, it was the ear wings. They were definitely cool. Mercury and myth and speed and now real and me. He nodded slowly. Oh yeah. The ear wings were definitely cool.

Then out of the corner of one eye, he saw the reflection of his backside. Ohmygod. His gloved hands shot down to his hips. He remembered Cindy Summers' hushed voice coming out of three earphones around him. Oh. My. God. What a tush on this kid. He sighed and rolled his eyes.

From downstairs, he heard Flash's voice. He didn't think he was calling to him but he wasn't sure. It was a sort of half shout or something. He zipped down there and a second later was standing next to Uncle Barry seated behind his desk in his Flash uniform typing away at an incredible speed at his desktop computer. He couldn't help but smirk. I can do that, now, too!

"Whatcha doin', Unc-, I mean, Flash?"

His red clad uncle gave him a surprisingly kind smile. "I'm trying to figure out exactly what happened to you."

"So . . . what happened to me?" asked Wally with a wince, realizing right away that there was no way Uncle Barry wouldn't go off on one of his science rants with an opening like that. They shouldn't have been called 'rants'. They were more monologues full of sometimes incomprehensible jargon. But that's what all the relatives called them at the Thanksgiving and Christmas get togethers. "Oh god, Boring off on another of his science rants."

He didn't disappoint, spinning out three minutes of dense scientific jargon as, all the while, he kept typing away at a rate of three thousand words a minute.

"Well, Kid Flash, a singularity was created within you by the introduction of an electromagnetic force whose constituent particles travel at the speed of light fusing a medium of extremely powerful acids with your molecules. Within your muscles, diffeomorphism invariant quantities have become infinite. At this very moment, at your skin, the Kretschmann scalar . . ."

Wally sighed quietly and mentally checked out. He had to. It was too much. He kept looking politely at Flash and waited for it to blow over. Finally, he sensed it was almost finished and listened closely again.

" . . and, number three, that you might serve as a partial proof of the Penrose-Hawking singularity theorem."

Flash was smiling, even as he kept typing away at an incredible rate with the images on the 23 inch monitor screen in front of him changing every second, sometimes text sometimes outlines of a body and then mostly outlines of two bodies. Kid Flash nodded. Flash loved this stuff. And he really was trying to be nice. He didn't want to offend him.

"Is there a-a Cliff's notes version of that, in really really simple terms?"

Flash did another furious burst of typing then sat back as the computer seemed to be processing his instructions, the monitor images zooming along, changing every second even while Flash leaned back on his chair and relaxed.

"Well, the lightning and chemicals created a singularity in your body that allows speedforce energy to flow-"

"Speedforce?"

Flash nodded. "That's what I call it. The singularity has created an interdimensional access . . within you and this allows the . . speedforce from that other dimension to flow into you and that's how you can run the way you do now."

Kid Flash smiled. Actual comprehensible english!

"Is that how it works for you, too?"

Flash nodded. "I was trying to recreate the circumstances of the accident that gave me my super speed when you visited that day. I got hit by lightning," he pointed at the lightning bolt symbol on the chest of his uniform, "in the same location, scorching through the same chemicals almost three years ago."

"Wait! So, lightning struck in the same spot? I thought that wasn't supposed to happen."

Flash shook his head. "It's unlikely but not impossible."

"So . . when you met Aunt Iris, were you a-a Flash then?"

"No, it happened a while after I'd already met your aunt."

"And you started being a hero right away?"

Flash nodded and Kid Flash saw him sigh and a pensive look come over his face.

"Look . . . your aunt is due back home in less than an hour. I've gotta get some dinner ready. When your Aunt Iris gets here, let me do the talking, okay?"

Kid Flash nodded. Several dozen times. In a second. Then he followed Flash as he zipped out to the kitchen and cut up some vegetables, added several pieces of chicken, made some kind of sauce or something and put it all in a large casserole dish that went in the oven all in a couple seconds. Kid Flash smirked. I can do that now, too!

He followed Flash back to the den where the computer had, apparently finished processing all his instructions. He looked on from beside Flash's right shoulder. The screen showed two three dimensional representations of a body and Kid Flash quickly realized they were both him. Every few seconds, Flash would let out a "Hmm!" or "Fascinating!". He was clearly in his element.

"What are you working on now?" Kid Flash offered timidly.

"The design principles of the speedforce," sighed Flash looking at the screen not at Kid Flash.

"Huh?"

"Well, Kid Flash, back when I got my super speed, my body changed, I mean the shape of my body changed some but I have to admit I wasn't careful enough to note how I'd changed before I had done quite a bit of running and therefore might attribute my changes to my activities. Also, I was fully grown when I got my speed. So, the speedforce had a lot less ability to change me. My bones were fused. But you . . ! You're just at the start of puberty, so the speedforce has been able to mold you into what it really wants."

"This . . speedforce . . wants something?"

"Well, I admit that saying that obviously connotes a sort of anthropomorphism toward what seems to only be an interdimensional energy transfer, but look at what it did to you!"

Kid Flash looked down at his red clad self while Flash typed a bit and the 3D picture of a body on the left side now took up most of the screen. Kid Flash half looked away. It was him, but naked, drawn with red lines on a black background.

"These are the data from the martian somavision images I took of you before and after your transformation. Now, look at you before you got super speed. You were just slightly above average height with a 29th percentile width pelvis. Then, after being transformed . . "

He typed a bit and the image on the right, green lines against a black background, now took up most of the screen. "You're almost five inches taller, 63.8 inches tall, and yet you now have a 19th percentile width pelvis. You got taller but your hips got narrower. That's not just a growth spurt being speed up. That's someone or some . . thing wanting you to have a certain type of body. Frankly, you were already a good shape for a speedster."

He switched the images again so that Wally 1.0 on the left, the red line version took up most of the screen. "You were lean, slender, long-legged, narrow pelvis but still 83rd percentile glutes and 79th percentile hip flexors, hell, 90th percentile calves. You were a good speedster shape but the speedforce sort of said 'Not good enough' and proceeded to make you what you are now."

He switched to the Wally 2.0 green line version on the right. Wally sighed and rolled his eyes. "Do I have to be naked?"

Flash frowned. "Wally. I'm surprised at you. This is science. It's no place for prudery or squeamishness. Besides which, this brings up another quandary. Why didn't the speedforce control everything?"

To Kid Flash's mortification, Flash zoomed the image in on what he'd been complaining most about seeing. Kid Flash held one red gloved hand in front of his face blocking his view and only intermittenly looked toward the screen.

"Your generative organ was more than adequate before, 75th percentile for length and 82nd for diameter but your phallus serves no purpose in utilzing super speed. If anything, it's extraneous weight. Yet, after your transformation, you were left with an organ in the 94th percentile for length and 98th for diameter, a completely counterproductive development. It even let your scrotum grow from 41 millileters, about the volume of a golf ball to 97 millileters, about the size of a racquetball, completely counterproductive. Why?"

Kid Flash looked down at himself and winced. "So, you . . . think it should've made my equipment smaller?"

"Of course! If it was going to be consistent, it should have shrunk your phallus to a size which would just barely allow you reproductive function."

Flash typed away feverishly again and out of the corner of his eye Kid Flash saw the representation of his equipment shrink from inconveniently large to embarassingly small. He shuddered.

"But it didn't do that to you, either, did it?"

Flash sighed. He typed a few dozen keystrokes in a second and the image reverted to its previous dimensions. "No. It's a curious omission. The speedforce went so far in shaping you as the perfect expression of speed. Almost all fat is burnt off you. You grow five inches but it's all in your legs. Your calves are amazing but it made your already scrawny forearms even more so-"

"Hey!"

"-and diminished your upper arms, too. It made your pelvis narrower to limit the mass of your torso but still increased the size of your gluteal minimus, gluteal maximus and hip flexors all at least a standard deviation beyond the 99th percentile muscle mass for a boy your height or weight. What a great athletic advantage for sprinting, a small pelvis but deep, powerful glutes. You might've had trouble finding pants that fit right before. Now . . ," Flash chuckled as he pointed to Kid Flash's rear.

"I-I get it! I get it!" Kid Flash finally snapped. "Speedforce . . the Sir Mix-a-Lot of . . interdimensional energy transfers."

Flash was puzzled. "Who's -"

"He likes big . . ," replied Kid Flash in the cadence of the song before gesturing with his head to one side expecting Flash to finish the line. Flash still looked puzzled.

"Never mind. It doesn't matter."

Kid Flash sighed as Flash went back to typing away at an incredible rate. Only uber nerd uncle barry could say all those things the way he did.

Flash went back to typing away at super speed. Kid Flash only watched, not sure what to do or say. A minute later he had to ask another question. Had to.

He had to go. How . . could he with the ridiculous suit? No problem, Flash explained without ever looking away from the rapidly changing screen. It's open at your face. You just pull that wide enough to get past your shoulders and then pull it down low enough to urinate.

Kid Flash nodded. He zipped over to the downstairs bathroom. He started tugging at the front of the cowl. At first he got nowhere and relented. The damn rubbery suit didn't give easy. But he really had to piss so he tried again and pulled harder at both sides of the opening for his face. Once he got it to sort of let go it went easier and in a second he had it down low enough. The weird supporter let go more easily and with a huge gasp of relief he did his business. That done, he pulled the suit back on and zipped back to the den.

For several minutes he just stood and watched over Flash's shoulder. At times he concentrated on the information on the screen and could read it all even though it scrolled past much too fast for a normal person to read. Uncle Barry must have changed some settings on the computer to suit him. But even being able to see the words wasn't enough as too much of it was that super sophisticated scientific jargon that Uncle Barry spoke that 12 year old Wally couldn't make sense of. He sighed and just stood back and waited for Flash to finish. Well, he tried to. He couldn't help interrupting a couple times.

"Will you teach me to do those arm cyclones?"

"You can run across oceans, too, right?"

"We can catch bullets, too, right?"

Flash looked up and answered patiently each time and then went back to his typing and computing. He also looked up and told Kid Flash "Stop that! Not in the house!" when Kid Flash started to spin his arm in a circle, trying to figure out the right way to angle his hand when making an arm cyclone.

Kid Flash was casually juggling five apples in the doorway when headlights swept through gaps in venetian blinds and across the field of vision of both speedsters.

Flash sat bolt upright at the desk.

"Your Aunt Iris!"

Kid Flash deftly caught all 5 apples. Good, he thought. He couldn't wait to tell Aunt Iris.

Flash zipped to his side. "Now, remember, let me explain this to your aunt, okay?"

Wally nodded 73 times. He could hear Aunt Iris driving into the garage then the door closing behind her and then her car door closing. She came in through the kitchen door and stopped at the sight of her husband and nephew wearing Flash suits.

"Flash, what are you doing here? And is . . is that Wally?"

Kid Flash was shocked. The tone of her voice was perfectly natural. Aunt Iris can lie? What?

She dropped her things on the counter. Kid Flash looked at Flash. His uncle was silently stammering.

He couldn't wait any longer and rushed at Aunt Iris stopping just inches short and launching into a monologue fueled by a combination of hyperactivity and super speed.

"AuntIris!Itwasincredible!IshouldbedeadbutI'mnot!Ishouldbeasmokingcorpse!InsteadIhavesuperspeed!Superspeed!Isavedthirteenpeople!Thirteenpeople!I'masuperheronowAuntIris!I'masuperhero!

He finished with a lunge the last half step forward to hug her. For her part, she managed to rub her nephew's back through his Flash suit with all the warmth she felt for him while simultaneously casting a glance toward his uncle that would make Captain Cold shed ice cube tears of envy.

Flash gulped and took a half step backward.

"What did he say?"

"Um, well, Iris. It-itwascompletelyunforseeable. He-"

"What. Did. He. Say? He was doing that thing that you do when you're nervous only he's excited."

Wally stepped back from her. "I saved 13 people," he whispered. "I'm a hero!"

Iris patted his red covered head, noticing the gash in the uniform that had let some of his orange hair show through.

"He got hit on the head?"

"Um, a, uh, burning building's roof um sort of collapsed on him while he was saving a boy-" replied Uncle Barry barely above a whisper now.

"I just didn't realized it had burned that far through," Kid Flash said with a reassuring nod.

Iris said nothing, just stared. Flash gulped again. She gave Wally a tender pat on his red clad shoulder.

"Honey," she said nice as could be, "your uncle and I are gonna go in the den and discuss this for a minute."

He watched Aunt Iris lead her super powered husband into the next room. "It really wasn't the way it must seem to you, Iris. He-" Flash offered weakly before she gave a look and he stopped talking. The door closed behind them and immediately the discussion turned heated. But Kid Flash could hear everything said by Aunt Iris and only pieces of what Uncle Barry said.

"ARE YOU FUCKING NUTS? HE'S 12 YEARS OLD . . NOT EVEN! I WAS GOING TO GIVE HIM HIS BIRTHDAY PRESENT A DAY EARLY ON SUNDAY! HE'S A 12 YEAR OLD BOY AND YOU WANT HIM TO RUN AROUND FIGHTING COLD AND GRODD AND ALL THE OTHERS?"

"Well . . . does have . . . speed . . . ran from Keystone . . . almost as . . . "

"I DON'T CARE IF HE'S FASTER THAN YOU! HE'S ALMOST 12 YEARS OLD, BARRY! HE'S BEEN CHEATED OUT OF THE CHILDHOOD HE SHOULD HAVE HAD BY MY INSANE BROTHER AND SISTER IN LAW. ARE YOU JUST TRYING TO MAKE SURE HE DOESN'T ACCIDENTALLY HAVE ONE AT ALL?"

"Ow! . . . hurts, Iris! . . . have to hit me?"

"IF THAT'S WHAT IT TAKES! HE'S ALMOST 12 YEARS OLD BARRY. HE'S A VERY SMART BOY BUT HE'S A 12 YEAR OLD BOY!"

"Well . . . was even . . . when he started and . . . "

Wally could hear Aunt Iris laughing bitterly.

"OH, SO NOW BATMAN'S YOUR MODEL FOR HOW TO TREAT A CHILD? FRICKING BATMAN? BAT! MAN! ARE YOU INSANE? THE CRAZED LONER? REMEMBER CALLING HIM THAT? A GUY WHOSE IDEA OF A NURTURING ENVIRONMENT IS PROBABLY LORD OF THE FLIES? BESIDES, I THOUGHT YOU SAID THAT THE LITTLE BAT HATES HIM!"

"Well, Iris . . . treat him like . . . treated Robin. I . . . "

"YOU'D BETTER NOT OR I'LL MAKE YOU WISH IT WAS ONLY SOME 700 POUND GORILLA WHO CAUGHT UP WITH YOU!"

"Ow! . . . necessary that you . . . Ow! . . of course I . . . ow!"

The room was quiet a moment. The door to the study opened just a few inches and Aunt Iris's head peeked out.

"Wally, honey," she began, her voice all sweetness. "There's a bag of frozen peas in the freezer. Would you get it for me, please?"

Wally zipped to the kitchen, withdrew the frozen peas from the freezer and zipped it to her at the door. She gave him a pat on the head and then pressed the frozen peas to the back of one hand for a few moments.

The door closed and at first things were quiet. Then he heard Uncle Barry saying something indistinct between yelps of pain. ". . . ow! . . . unnhh! . . . ow!"

"HE'S YOUR NEPHEW, BARRY! HE'S NOT A SCIENCE PROJECT!"

"I understand that Iris . . . saying . . . diminishment of his . . . and yet allowed . . . generative . . . "

"AAARRRGGGHHH! WHAT WAS I JUST SAYING? HE'S YOUR NEPHEW NOT A PARTICIPANT IN SOME DOUBLE BLIND TEST OF SUPER SPEED!"

" . . . know that, I . . . Ow! Ow, Iris! My ear wings aren't made to be pulled like that!"

The room went quiet again.

A minute later, Aunt Iris emerged from the den followed by Uncle Barry who now had the cowl of his uniform pulled down around his neck, though Wally could still see that the left ear wing hung loosely from it, almost detached and dangling at an odd angle. Aunt Iris sidled up to him. Her voice was soft but there was force behind it.

"Wally. We have to talk about this. Look at you! So tall! You look wonderful, but you're too young to be risking your life being a hero."

Wally shook his head very slightly. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Flash seeming to try to warn him of something.

He saw an intense look of concentration on Aunt Iris's face. There was a pause of several seconds. She went for the weak spot.

"Wally. Do you really want to run around in public in that suit?"

Wally sighed. "I-I have to do this, Aunt Iris . . even if I have to wear this ridiculous suit."

She wiped her face with one hand. Her voice trembled and her eyes had become watery. "Wally. You-"

"Aunt Iris! I have to do this. I have to. In-in school, when someone picks on my best friend Chan or one of the other guys, I-I can't just stand and watch. Even when I can get away I-I always have to run back and try to help. I can't just run off. I . . . Some kids can. It's not that they're bad. It's-it's just the way they are. But even when some kid I don't know is the one being picked on, I-I just can't stand there. I can't. The guys make fun of me for it sometimes, like, what do you think you're doing? I'm-I'm not saying I'm better than other kids. It's . . it's just the way I am. Chan is like super neat. He can't help it. Things have to be in order for him. They have to be. It's the way he is. I . . saved 13 people from that fire today. 13 people! I can't let 13 people die, not when I can save them. I . . can't. I have to do this!"

Aunt Iris wrapped him in another hug that lasted a long time. It felt like acceptance and it felt really good.

And from that point forward, she didn't question his becoming a hero. Oh, she wanted restrictions on his activities. She made him promise no fighting super villains for at least a year. He had to run and get Flash or someone else to help. And he was only supposed to patrol solo after Flash said he could.

But she was also a great advocate for him. While they were eating dinner, he and Flash both having two servings of everything, he asked Flash when he'd teach him to do arm cyclones. Aunt Iris jumped right in and before dinner was over had made Flash commit to a schedule for training him the next two months, which super speed tricks when and even setting up communications between Kid Flash and Jump City.

After dinner he went for another run with Flash. So. Freaking. Awesome.

They went a different direction speeding over different landscapes, again making hills, valleys and mountains insignificant with their speed.

When they got back home, Kid Flash was really tired. He ate a container of chinese takeout leftovers in the fridge and talked some more with Aunt Iris and Uncle Barry. He didn't remember falling asleep in the living room but suddenly there was Flash standing over him nudging his shoulder.

"Hey, tiger, time for bed."

Everything was a bit hazy after that. He remembered brushing his teeth at super speed in the bathroom upstairs and taking off his suit and packing it back into the ring surprisingly easily. Once off, it shrunk down to an inch high on its own. He remembered wrapping a towel around his waist and going across the hall to the guest room and jumping under the covers.

And he was pretty sure that, at some point in the night, Aunt Iris had checked in on him and sat on the edge of the bed and patted his head while speaking softly about how much she loved him. He was sure that she had been there. The words were what he knew she would have said.


	6. A new day and speedster tag

"This is the first day of the rest of your life" is a common cliche. Sometimes it's used in an attempt to encourage someone to think of this day as having a new sense of importance, as being different than all the other days before it.

For most people that's a load of crap. For Wally West it was an apt description of the situation.

Late Friday afternoon he'd been struck by lightning and bathed in super-acids. He was now a super speedster. But he had now idea how to live as one on this first full day this way.

That was quickly proved the next morning when the alarm went off in the guest room where he was sleeping. Forgetting all about his new super speed, the nearly 12 year old leaped for the hated alarm with its grating electronic Eeep! Eeep! Eeep! sound. And, to his surprise found himself moving at incredible speed for 1/1000th of a second, he found himself hurtling through the air past the nightstand and the alarm that he swatted at a still perplexing to him rate of speed. Had he remembered what he was, he would have stopped himself easily. But he only remembered, oh yeah, I have super speed after another 1/1000th of a second, just before his body slammed lengthwise into the bookcase on that side of Aunt Iris and Uncle Barry's guest room.

"Unnhhh," he groaned as paperback books showered down over him from the bookcase, half of them seeming to bounce off his head, to his exasperation. Just as this cascade of books thudding onto him was finishing he heard footsteps approaching in the hall and there was a knock on the door. He had a moment of panic. He wasn't wearing anything but before Aunt Iris peeked her head into the room he had confirmed that everything was covered by fallen books that had to be covered.

"Are you okay, Wally?"

He nodded. "I just forgot that I'm . . a . . a speedster now."

"Okay, well, breakfast is in 15 minutes. Wash up first."

As soon as she was gone down the hall, Wally extricated himself from the rubble pile of books and then used his super speed to return them all to the shelves in a second. He smiled and, for the first of many times that day, noted, "I can do that now, too!".

A little more pride in his posture now, he strode over to the mirror. He liked what he saw, five inches taller than just yesterday, totally fat free, smaller waist, wider shoulders and some extra muscle in a totally speedster way. Oh yeah. And even . . that was larger. He'd already had the biggest one on the chess team. And now he was even much bigger. Oh yeah, this whole speedster deal was pretty cool.

"I'm Kid Flash," he declared to the image in the mirror, trying out the name again.

But right now the sound of his rumbling stomach seemed more important than the sound of this new name for himself. He was incredibly hungry. He scoured the room for something to wear to go down the hall to the bathroom and wash up. He saw a Flash ring on the dresser but frowned at that. He had to have a talk with Uncle Barry about that suit. No boy should have to wear something that tight!

He opened all the dresser drawers and finally found what looked like an extra pair of Uncle Barry's boxer shorts. He held them up with one hand and made his way to the bathroom. He let the shorts go and started the shower. First he inspected his chin closely in the mirror over the sink. He scowled. Not one, yet. Not a single whisker.

Oh well. he jumped in the shower and first got wet all over then soaped himself up in just two seconds. He smiled through the rinsing spray. I can do that, too!

When he stepped out of the shower and started drying himself, a task he completed in just over one second, he heard Aunt Iris's voice from the other side of the bathroom door.

"Wally, honey? There's a box in wrapping paper on the chair in the corner of the guest bedroom. I want you to try that stuff on-"

"Okay," Wally half shouted back.

". . see how it fits you and while you train with your uncle, today, I'll get you some more clothes."

"Yes, ma'am!"

He waited a minute then zipped back to the guest bedroom and looked at the soft chair in the corner and there was a box covered in red wrapping paper.

Inside the box were some pairs of boxer shorts, a dress shirt and a black suit. He thought it might still fit him. When Aunt Iris bought clothes for him she always bought things a size or two up so that he'd be able to wear it even if he had a growth spurt. But he was now five inches taller than yesterday and all speedsterized.

He pulled on a pair of the boxers and they were okay. There was plenty of room at the waist but they were too small below that. He gingerly stepped into the dress pants of the suit. His calves nearly filled the lower part of each pant leg and they looked too short but worst of all they were extremely tight in the seat before he'd even started to pull the zipper up. When he did . .

Rrrriiippp!

The rear seam let go.

He stood there glowering into the mirror.

Great. Just great. I'm so much a speedster that I can't fit into normal pants. Just great.

With great reluctance, he poked his head out the door of the guest room into the hall to ask for a Flash suit to wear. Aunt Iris was setting the dining room table and saw him. "How's that stuff fit, Wally?"

He grimaced. "It's too small. I . . I burst the rear seam of the pants."

Aunt Iris only partly stifled a smile. "I'll take some measurements before you leave with your uncle."

"Yes, ma'am. But, for now, so that I have something to wear, I -sigh- need one of Uncle Barry's Flash suits. The one I wore last night had a tear at the cowl."

Aunt Iris finished setting the table and went out of his view toward the den. A few seconds later, Uncle Barry zipped to the guest room door and handed him a lightning bolt ring. Wally closed the door and triggered the compartment within the ring. On cue, a red Flash suit popped out and, as designed, expanded on first contact with air. Before it could shrink back down to its normal one inch high size, Wally had pulled on the weird supporter that went with it, the suit, boots and gloves, though he left the top of the suit, the cowl, down around his neck.

He zipped over to the mirror to look at himself. His head dropped in despair.

It was just as bad as he'd remembered. Insanely revealing. People will all see me like . . this? He remembered he and his friends snickering at the high school age ballet dude from the Jump City School of ballet who'd performed in white tights at their junior high school. He felt certain that they'd snicker at him, too, if he was dressed like this.

He made his way to the kitchen and was delighted to wolf down two full plates of french toast and ham served up by Aunt Iris. His mother would almost certainly have carped about how he was eating her out of house and home. But Aunt Iris didn't say anything. She didn't seem to mind at all or find it surprising. He gulped down a third glass of orange juice just before leaving the table.

All while he ate, Uncle Barry was outlining how he was going to train that day. First vibration training. Vibrating your molecules was a crucial ability for speedsters. Wally nodded. Then arm cyclone training. Wally nodded. Then something called one man hurricane training and speed recognition training and running on water training. Wally nodded. He did a lot of nodding. His mouth was full of french toast and ham.

After breakfast, Uncle Barry changed into his uniform and they were about to go when Aunt Iris gave a small shout of "Wait!". She hurried over to Wally with a measuring tape in hand and quickly took several measurements of her deeply embarassed nephew. He had to look away. He felt practically naked in the ridiculous red uniform and his aunt was measuring . . all over him. She said she would try to find him some good clothes that he could wear while he was out training with Uncle Barry. He wanted to suggest that she find him a good uniform that he could wear but didn't have the opportunity before he had to speed out of the house following Flash.

That day of training was like the effort of 50 days of school. Flash told Kid Flash to follow him and ran out to a white desert sort of an area, the dry great salt lake in Utah. It was flat and wide open and perfect for speedsters to practice without having to worry about running into people.

He was laser focused on every word Flash said and when they were taking a few minutes to catch their breath late in the morning noted to himself that he never had to pay attention like this in school. But pay attention he did. He was riveted to Flash's teaching.

First they practiced vibrating. Flash showed him how it was best to start it with contractions of your abdominal muscles to have the effect move out from the center of your body, though you could also start it with a tap of either hand or even a kick from either foot if necessary. Flash made Kid Flash prove that he had mastered each technique before they moved on to the next one. They would practice on harmless things first before moving on to bigger challenges. Kid Flash had to first show that he could vibrate his molecules well enough to be barely visible. Then he had to vibrate through a barrier of poster paper. Then he had to vibrate through an open car door and finally a thick masonry wall. And Flash would critique how well he did each of these tasks. Even though he went through the first paper barrier with no problems, Flash said he wasn't vibrating his molecules rapidly enough. He put his hand to the poster paper and said that it felt slightly warmer. "You must've imparted some energy to it from your molecules. That means you need to vibrate faster to get through more cleanly."

Kid Flash could only sigh and do as he was told. After the vibration practice, Flash tutored him in creating arm cyclones. This was a bit more fun. But Flash was still extremely precise about it. Do it again. Do it again. Do it again. "I still don't think you have your hand angled quite right to get the strongest effect."

He was right, of course, but it was a little exasperating at times. The difference in how strong an arm cyclone Kid Flash made before and after the last time he adjusted the angle of his hand were almost impossible to discern.

Flash also talked, when he stopped to let Kid Flash catch his breath, about stragtegies for using various Flash abilities. Arm cyclones were more important against Weather Wizard and Heatwave but not so much against Captain Cold or Gorilla Grodd. They could be used well against average crooks in the right situation, too.

The next tutorial was in what Flash called 'one man hurricanes'. This was when sprinted in a circle around a crook or a villain and created such a powerful updraft that it lifted him right off the ground. Flash demonstrated. He circled around Kid Flash at a tremendous speed and sure enough, Kid Flash felt himself being pulled upward and then his 109 pounds being lifted right off the ground till he was 15 feet up in the air. Flash gradually slowed and he dropped gently to the ground, coming down on one leg and one hand then regaining his balance.

"Let me try!" he pleaded. Flash smiled and agreed. He ran in a circle around Flash 30 feet out from him. At first, nothing happened, then he poured on the speed a bit more and saw Flash start to lift off the ground with the force of the updraft he was creating. He grinned. It works! I did it!

And then he really poured on the speed but suddenly Flash was shooting upward, 20 . . 30 . . 40 . . 50 feet up. He panicked. Oh crap! He could see Flash shouting something too him but the sound waves moved much too slow. He circled a little slower and Flash first stopped rising then started descending. He tried to get the speed reduction just right to put him down gently but didn't quite manage it and Flash landed on one heel then fell on his butt.

They each ran a hurricane around the other three times. The last two times, Flash showed Kid Flash how you could left an opponent off the ground and also move the hurrican and move your opponent to get him away from some sensitive location or to drop him in water or perhaps an enclosure like a prison.

Running on water was a trick Kid Flash was particularly anxious to learn. The thing was, it wasn't much of a trick at all. Flash went off on one of his science rants explaining why it worked. But it was easy. Over a certain speed and you could stay on the surface easy. You just have to be aware that you couldn't change directions quickly. And, Flash told him, if you're running on ocean water or a great lake, something with big waves, you had to try and run along the wave troughs. Never try to run over the wave crests.

Kid Flash nodded. He did a lot of nodding and 'yes sir'-ing.

Finally, Flash did a whole series of testing Kid Flash to help him identify how fast he was going. This was important, Flash explained, because a speedster had to know when he was speeding up to or slowing down toward the speed of sound. You didn't want to make a sonic boom to alert someone that you were approaching. And you didn't want to be inconsiderate toward civilians. You didn't want to break the glass in their windows or worry them that a bomb had exploded somewhere nearby.

At first, Kid Flash had no idea how fast he was going at any time. He had no conception of how fast he was sprinting. It was obviously way faster than he'd ever gone in a car. But he had no idea how fast. Flash told him that he didn't have any clue how fast he was running when he first started but that he'd run past mile markers on interstate highways till he had a very strong sense. Now he knew that running a certain rate was 500 miles per hour. Running at another rate was 2,000 miles per hour. Running at still another rate was 20,000 miles per hour.

He had Kid Flash run past those same interstate highway mile markers several times and he quizzed him over and over again about how fast he was running.

"How fast now?"

"500 miles per hour?"

"No! 400."

And then, seconds later, "How fast now?"

"Now 500 miles per hour?"

"No, you overshot. This is 550 miles per hour."

"Sorry."

"Don't be sorry, just get it right. We have to get this stuff right."

Flash had his protege running down interstates for three hours till he started to show a better sense of how fast he was running at any point in time.

They finally trudged, well, for speedsters it was trudging, back to Keystone City. They'd taken a break for lunch. Flash had produced a $20 bill from under one glove and they raced to a fast food place in the nearest town. Kid Flash had been mortified that there was a group of girls right behind them in line and he could hear them giggling and whispering things about how his uniform fit and about his butt. Flash was greeting all the parents and introducing them to Kid Flash. He's new, Flash explained. Some of the people had seen the CNN and Fox news coverage of his first action the previous night. They were all friendly, but it took every ounce of self control that he had to stand there wearing just the ridiculous uniform and the freaky jock underneath and talk to fully clothed people ten feet away.

But he held his tongue through the afternoon's training. However, when they got back to the house that evening, the moment they were inside, Aunt Iris saw Kid Flash pleading with his mentor.

"How about a cape," suggested Kid Flash and gesturing with one hand to the middle of his thigh. "down to here?"

Flash sighed. "Speedsters don't wear capes. Lousy aerodynamics."

Kid Flash buzzsawed through an apple from the fruit bowl on the counter.

"Okay, then how about a black uniform?"

"Heroes don't wear black. That's villain chic."

Flash buzzsawed through a pear.

"What if I had some red or orange with it, at the edges or something?"

Flash shook his head.

"What if my uniform was black and gray?"

"Still villain-ish."

"But those are Batman's colors!"

"What's all this about?" interrupted Aunt Iris.

Flash sighed. "Some girls giggled a bit at him."

"They practically laughed out loud at the sight of me in this uniform!" Kid Flash corrected him to Aunt Iris, tugging at the red over his abs but not separating it from his skin.

"Well, I think he ought to have a different uniform," she said to Flash. Kid Flash zipped to her side with a beaming smile.

"See! See! It's not just me!"

"I mean, Barry. He's a 12 year old boy, well, in two days. The suit kind of puts it all out there. And why not at least let him have his own identity separate from yours. On top of that, he's so sk- . . . so slender. Couldn't you do something to break up the lines of him?"

"Yeah!" Kid Flash cheered. "Break up my . . lines."

Flash stood there pensively for several moments. "Allright," he finally offered. "I'll see if I can come up with something.

An hour later, he had. In fact, he said he had two new designs for Wally to try. He handed Wally a ring and directed him to the den. In a second, Wally returned wearing a uniform that was divided into thirds, vertically. The center third, front and back, was a deep dark red, almost a maroon. The outer third to each side of it was white. The boots were also a different style and the gloves were that same maroon but fingerless. The cowl had lensed goggles over the eyes and let his orange hair flow out the top of it.

At first, Kid Flash kind of liked it. The maroon was so dark that it lessened how conspicuous the bulge of his equipment was. But he zipped up to Aunt Iris's three sided mirror and saw that this improvement was more than canceled out by the way he thought it showed his butt in even greater detail with the white.

"Uh uh," he said shaking his head.

"Why not?" asked Flash almost an offended fashion designer in this case.

"Barry!" Aunt Iris jumped in with a reproach before he could answer. "You don't divide the uniform vertically if you're trying to lessen the perception of his slenderness."

Flash sighed in realization that she was right.

"Yeah!" added Kid Flash.

"Allright. Try this one, then," said Flash handing him another ring.

Kid Flash zipped into the den and then returned wearing a suit of two colors, red and yellow divided just below the waist, with yellow on top and red from the waist down. Again, the top of the cowl was omitted and his orange hair flowed freely out the top of the uniform. But with the bright yellow top to this uniform, it didn't seem so conspicuous.

Aunt Iris nodded slowly while circling her nephew. "I like it, Barry! I like it! Bold but nicely matching."

Flash stood up a little straighter and smiled, basking in her compliment.

Kid Flash sighed in disappointment. Everything from the waist down was exactly the same as the old suit. the only difference was the top half being yellow and his hair flowing out the top. There was even a sense that, somehow, this suit was even tighter than the old one if that was possible.

He voiced this displeasure to Flash who nodded casually that of course it was tighter. He said that the suit Wally had been wearing was an old one he'd worn hundreds of times and which had probably lost a tiny bit of its elasticity.

Kid Flash stood there, mouth open. A tighter suit! His head dropped limply at the neck. I'm stuck with an even tighter suit. How the hell is this even possible?

He pleaded in vain for a looser suit but Flash was adamant that super speedsters had to wear suits like this. Kid Flash started to ask about the freaky jock he wore underneath but Flash wouldn't listen to any more complaining about his uniform. That was it.

Kid Flash groaned. It took a long minute before he composed himself. He told Flash he needed to use the bathroom. He only had to pee but he had to pull the whole suit down to his waist and then push the front down far enough to pee. It wasn't easy. The suit couldn't easily be separated from his skin. But he took a long, satisfying piss, washed his hands, and went back to the kitchen where Flash was talking to Aunt Iris.

He had an odd feeling that he couldn't quite put a finger on. All the super speeding they'd done left him with a pleasant sort of mildly euphoric sensation all through his body. Why couldn't they do something . . fun? That was the way to express it. He wanted to do something fun.

He zipped to Aunt Iris's side. "When's dinner?" he asked

"Forty minutes or so," she said patting his orange haired head. "I just started. Want to see some of the clothes I got for you."

Kid Flash shrugged his indifference and turned to Flash.

"Can't we . . can't we do something fun with this?" he asked pointing to Flash's uniform then his own.

Flash sighed. "Kid Flash! I told you. That's enough about the uniform. I don't understand why you're so upset. You have a terrific meso-ectomorphic physique. And because we're speedsters, we-"

"That's not what I mean. You're it!" shouted Kid Flash as he tagged Flash on the head and he sprinted from the room vibrating out the back door of the house.

Flash gave a look of professorial impatience with a wayward student.

In a split second, Kid Flash was back. He gulped down a glass of water and then flicked at Flash's ear wings first on one side of his cowl then the other. "You're it, old man!" he laughed and, again, ran from the house vibrating through the back wall.

Again, Flash expressed an almost magisterial perspective on this silliness and glanced to Iris for support.

She shrugged. "He's a 12 year old boy. He wants to play a bit. Is that so bad?"

"Iris. We-"

Kid Flash zipped back into the house, vibrating in through the back wall then went straight to Flash, whose cowl he yanked down over his eyes. "You're still it!" he shouted before speeding off.

"That's it, young man!" warned Flash and he sped off after him.

He thought he would catch Kid Flash fairly easily but the pre-teen speedster's top speed was closer to his own than he would have expected or cared to admit. And just as he got close, a laughing Kid Flash would veer off on a tight turn. If there was one thing the shorter protege could outdo his mentor at it was tight turns, as a result of a lower center of gravity. Approaching one highway interchange, Flash had nearly caught him but Kid Flash sped through all four clover leafs of the interchange, in turn, zingzingzingzing, and did so at such a pace that he put a gap between him and his mentor.

He pulled other clever tricks. At one point, in southern Ohio, Flash had taken a wider turn going from one interstate to another and ended up sprinting over a small lake. Kid Flash poured on the speed there, knowing from his lessons that it was hard to accelerate quickly running on water. Another time, he pulled what looked like it was going to be the same trick, getting Flash to be running over water and then accelerated and the instant Flash accelerated over water to try and match him, he took a sharp left turn onto a side road, a maneuver that Flash couldn't possibly duplicate over water.

This developed such a gap between them that Kid Flash had the time to stop a moment and hide. He was in central Kansas and he zipped into the center of a huge wheat field being careful to vibrate a bit so that he didn't blaze a telltale path to where he was hiding.

He crouched down as he saw Flash approach a moment later on the interstate then zip off to the frontage road beside the field.

"I heard your footsteps stop in this area," shouted Flash now grinning, obviously enjoying the game. He scanned the field but sunlight on the golden wheat did a nice job of hiding the orange haired, yellow topped speedster.

"This isn't supposed to be hide and seek, you know. You said it was tag."

Kid Flash said nothing back and only grinned at Flash's mild exasperation.

Then Flash made a mild arm cyclone and aimed it from left to right across the field. The wheat waved back and forth and the yellow and red clad speedster was revealed at the far end of the field.

"Aha!"

The pre-teen speedster lit out eastward for Missouri at his top speed. He had a few steps on Flash but the full sized speedster steadily gained on him no matter how fast he ran. And then, he started to run out of energy. All of a sudden it was like he was a car whose tank had just hit empty. Somewhere in Ohio, at the side of a deserted county road, he came to a stop and Flash zipped to his side before giving him a hug.

"You were right. That was a lot of fun. I loved that. I-I was so used to being the only one who could run this fast I didn't realize how much I would like for there to be someone else."

Kid Flash hugged back. This felt so good.

When Flash finally let go he almost involuntarily whispered, "My father never hugs me."

Flash took a slow, solemn breath unsure what to say.

"I mean," Kid Flash continued softly. "He never has. Not once. Not that I remember."

Flash patted his head. "Have you thought about what you're going to tell your parents about yourself?"

Kid Flash shrugged. "I haven't."

"We'll stay home tonight. Maybe we'll talk about that. Your Aunt Iris wants to talk to you about dealing with the media. And you need some detective lessons."

"Dealing with the media?"

Flash nodded. "You're about to be the flavor of the month. She'll . . she'll explain."

Kid Flash nodded. Another part of this new life.

They walked along, side by side, without saying anything for another quarter mile before Flash turned to him.

"Feel recharged?"

Kid Flash nodded and sped off with Flash at his side.

He had a huge dinner, two plates full of Aunt Iris's meatloaf and mashed potatoes and carrots. He pushed back from the table patting his abs in satisfaction. This felt good.

After dinner, Aunt Iris presented him with some new underwear and a bathrobe. He zipped back to his room and changed out of his Kid Flash uniform and into some underwear and the bathrobe and then sat on the couch and watched four straight episodes from Uncle Barry's DVD collection of the Columbo tv show. It was Uncle Barry's favorite and Wally kind of liked it, too. Lieutenant Columbo investigated murders for the Los Angeles police department but all the cases seemed to be rich jerks who constantly sneered at him and took him for granted. And every time he'd catch them on some tiny inconsistency in their story.

Wally watched with his feet up on the couch, knees up to his chest, sitting between Aunt Iris and Uncle Barry. Uncle Barry went off on a three minute science rant after each episode. Aunt Iris kept her arm around his shoulders the whole time in a hug and twice, out of the blue, kissed him on the forehead.

"Aunt Iris!" He complained, but he loved it.

Somewhere along the line he fell asleep and partially woke as Uncle Barry was carrying him to the guest room bed and then patting his head before Aunt Iris gave him another kiss. Or that might have been a dream. It was hard to tell.


	7. Another speedster day

If Wally's first full day as a speedster was memorable for the newness of it all, his second, surprisingly, stood out most for how much he'd already adjusted to being one.

He woke up Sunday morning to the same Eeep!Eeep!Eeep! of the alarm but casually swiped at it with one hand at super speed to shut it off.

This didn't mean he was going to get out of bed. The bed in the guest room at Aunt Iris and Uncle Barry's house was huge. It was king size and it had an expensive, pillow top mattress and expensive sheets. It was heavenly soft compared to his old, twin size mattress at home with its springs that practically poked you in the ribs. He let out a contented sigh and sank back into the warm embrace of the quilt and covers.

A few luxurious minutes later, he shifted beneath the covers and couldn't help but notice something.

"Damnnn," he muttered and lifted the covers to glance. He gave a smirk of satisfaction and dropped the covers offering a silent thanks to the Speedforce for not being totally consistent and keeping his mass down in every way that did not make him faster like Uncle Barry thought it should have.

He seriously considered giving in to the urge to do . . that. Why not? His was freaking epic! There were multiple fantasies he could indulge.

Wonnnnnder Girl! . . . Baaaaaaat Girl! Yes! . . . Cat Woman-

He raised an eyebrow. Wait, where did that come from? How am I thinking of being with a villainess? She is a villain, isn't she?

He sighed. It didn't matter. He couldn't do anything in Aunt Iris's house. Not . . that.

He sighed. And just as he did, there was a knock at the door and Aunt Iris telling him from the hallway that breakfast was in 15 minutes.

He ate prodigiously again, but barely gave it a second thought even as he finished his eighth pancake and started gobbling up strips of bacon. Uncle Barry was eating just about as much so it didn't seem so odd. He washed it all down with multiple glasses of orange juice and a half hour later he and Uncle Barry had changed into their ridiculously tight uniforms.

To Kid Flash's disappointment, most of the training he got Sunday was the same training he got Saturday, vibrating, arm cyclones, one man hurricanes and tests of knowing how fast he was running all with slight variations.

Kid Flash put everything into it but wished the day had been spent on something different. He knew he could do these things. Flash's insistence on incredible precision in how he used his speed made sense but it was a bit frustrating at the same time. At lunch time, Flash had him follow him to another fast food, naturally, place just off the edge of the great salt lake. Again, Kid Flash was mortified at girls seated at tables right next to the line of customers ordering pointing at him, whispering and, worst of all, giggling. He fumed and shuffled foward when Flash did. All the while, Flash casually spoke to and waved to other customers, not bothered at all about how ridiculously they were dressed. Kid Flash slowly shook his head as Flash signed an autograph on a napkin as a girl was holding her phone behind him and taking a picture.

Finally, they got out of there and ate. They didn't even make a pretense of eating normally with Aunt Iris not around. They devoured two meals each in a few seconds then let out prodigious belches each. After that, Flash led him back to the salt flats and they spent the afternoon training. To Kid Flash's chagrin, they kept going over the speedster basics. He sighed and rolled his eyes, but had to go along with it.

By the end of the afternoon, Kid Flash could feel that euphoric sensation of super speed endorphins almost overwhelming him. He was soooo ready to taunt Flash to play tag with him. But it barely took any teasing to get Flash to play this time. He almost wished it had taken more.

Kid Flash had laughed and run off to the east, sprinting into Wyoming on I-80. Flash again found it hard to catch his protege as every time he got close to the pre-teen speedster the red and yellow clad boy would suddenly dart off to the left or right more sharply than his taller mentor could. What's more, the boy would let out a laugh as he did.

And he came up with other tricks. Kid Flash got a little separation from Flash at one point and headed off the interstate toward a lake. Flash followed and briefly lost sight of Kid Flash behind some buildings and trees as he ran onto the lake. Flash turned up the speed but suddenly realized, almost at the other end of the mile long lake that he'd totally lost Kid Flash. He wasn't in sight and there was no trail of ripples from his sprinting steps. He stopped, befuddled, at the shore and only then heard Kid Flash laughing and shaking off water before sprinting away in the opposite direction. He'd dived under water and swam the other way.

Another time, running across a dusty Texas plain Kid Flash sprinted off the interstate and then off a lesser paved road onto a dirt road. Up ahead, the road forked to either side of some hills. When he reached the fork, Kid Flash gave a brief burst of arm cyclones from both arms, as hard as he could, down one path. So, when Flash reached the fork a moment later, there were clouds of dust going off in both directions. He had to guess which way Kid Flash had gone. He guessed wrong and the tiring young speedster got a brief reprieve.

But soon enough Flash did catch up to him. He just didn't have the stamina to keep Flash from catching him for long. He would tire out and Flash would zoom in and tag him. As they waited a few minutes for Kid Flash to recover before speeding back to Keystone City, Flash went over typical police terminology and how he should speak when interacting with the police. Flash was adamant that he had to be perfectly respectful and proper at all times. Kid Flash nodded.

"It's very important that they trust us so that we can do our jobs as well as possible."

Kid Flash nodded.

"If not, lives could be lost. People could be hurt."

Kid Flash nodded.

Flash patted his head. "I say that after playing a game with you for the last half hour." Now he patted his shoulder. "But I suppose it's good practice for you to get some experience using your speed sort of on the fly as it were."

Kid Flash nodded and this time grinned.

"Okay, let's go back home."

The two speedsters sprinted off for Keystone City.

As they were approaching the City, Flash suddenly put one hand to one of his ear wings and held out the other arm in front of Kid Flash to slow him down. He jogged to a halt, obviously listening in to something and then quickly turned to Kid Flash.

"I've got KCPD dispatch wired into my ear wing. They've got a high speed chase on the far side of town that they're breaking off of. The guy's going crazy fast through a dense residential area."

"Crazy fast?" smirked Kid Flash and he and Flash were off. It was almost too easy for super speedsters. There was a new dodge Challenger blowing through red lights on East Keystone Boulevard going 110 mph through streets lined every step of the way with shops and appartment buildings.

Flash ran alongside the car and reached in the driver's window and pulled the latch to pop open the hood. Kid Flash jumped up on the car and pulled at and disconnected every wire he could find while Flash kept one hand on the wheel to keep the car going straight as it slowed to a stop. As it did, Flash punched the driver three times in a half second, knocking him out. A crowd started to gather, from among pedestrians and customers of a sidewalk cafe. There were bits of applause and shouts of "Way to go, Flash!"

But there had been another crook in the back seat and as the car rolled to a full stop he shoved the passenger side seat forward and snaked out the window. He started to run.

All of a sudden, red and yellow clad Kid Flash was standing in front of him.

The speedster shook his head slightly. "Running for it? Really? You were stopped by Flashes annnnnd you then decide to run for it. Really?"

The crook was flustered. "Who the-who the fuck are you, you little freak?" he snorted before turning and running in the opposite direction only to find Kid Flash standing there in red and yellow in front of him again.

"Nope. Won't work."

The crook shifted from again flustered to angry. "Oh yeah, then how 'bout this, kid? Will this work?!"

The six foot three inch tall 220 pound crook swung at him with a roundhouse right, then a left hook, then another right, then another.

Kid Flash effortlessly dodged each attempt stopping a foot back or to the side in a casual stance just past the arc of each punch.

"Well . . it would . . if you could . . hit me . . but you can't."

The crowd of onlookers was cheering Kid Flash and laughing at the crook now. A very hard look came across the crook's face and he started to reach into the jacket he wore. Kid Flash jumped at him and hit him five times in a fraction of a second. The crook crumpled to the pavement just as police cruisers were descending on the scene followed by the News 5 with Josh Logan! van.

The cops showed Kid Flash the gun that the crook had been reaching for. Kid Flash tried to act all nonchalant about it while inside wanting to do a victory dance at busting his first criminal. Outside, his hand hurt. After a minute, it felt better but he resolved to ask Flash for some lessons in boxing.

In the back seat of the car were a bunch of stolen jewels. As Flash and the cops pieced it together, these two guys had just robbed a high end jewelry store. A call had finally come in from the store. The employees had been tied up. One just got free and called 9-1-1. The crooks wanted to make a quick getaway and had run a red light. Once a police cruiser started after them they pushed it to the limit. If they'd only not run that red they might be cruising out of Keystone at that very moment.

Flash and Kid Flash were interviewed by Jerry Aldini, not Josh Logan, for channel 5. Flash did most of the talking but Jerry Aldini seemed more interested in talking to Kid Flash. He asked him if that was a new uniform. Kid Flash said it was and that this was his uniform from now on. But he immediately returned to standard Flash talk. Just happy to do what we can to help people.

After the interview was over, the gathered crowd gave Flash and Kid Flash a round of applause. They both waved thanks and then sped off. Seconds later they were vibrating through the back wall of the house. They called out to Aunt Iris before each buzzsawed through a piece of fruit from the bowl on the counter. But she wasn't there. Flash said there was a note on the refrigerator saying she was investigating something and she'd be back at dinner time. Flash started to prepare dinner.

While he did, Kid Flash zipped to the den and turned on the computer. He was curious how Jump City's baseball team had done in the game that day and he wanted to check online to see what news there was about him.

While waiting for the machine to boot up, he zipped around the den. One thick notebook caught his eye. It was very high quality, leather cover and binding but with no title or anything to identify it. He absentmindedly flipped through its pages while half looking at other things in the room. A couple page headings caught his eye and he realized that this was Uncle Barry's Flash notebook. There was a page with big red penned letters GORILLA GRODD. Others were topped by CAPTAIN COLD, HEATWAVE and WEATHER WIZARD. He caught a little bit of what was written as he kept flipping. The notes were like scouting reports.

"Extremely jealous of Solovar"

And, a couple pages later, "Persecution complex at not having gotten scientific community's recognition"

He kept flipping pages. Not all the notes were about villains. One page said something about a "Million Pound Punch" another was headlined "REMOVING SPEED!". A third read only "TREADMILL".

There was a beep from the computer and Kid Flash left the notebook and zipped over and sat down in Uncle Barry's chair facing the monitor. He went online and gave a small cheer at seeing that Jump City's team had beaten the Dodgers. Next he did a search under the term "Kid Flash". To his surprise, there were already five YouTube videos about him. Four dealt with the rescue on Friday night at the burning apartment complex. Three were just copies of his interview with Cindy Summers of Action 7. One was grainy, unsteady cell phone video of him running up the side of the building and then running back down the side of it with Alberto, the boy he'd saved.

He felt pretty proud of those. Even the usually snarky YouTube commenters were impressed.

"Dude must run a 0.1 40!"

"Little man's speed is off da chain!"

"Has he got an older sister? I like me some fast girls ;)"

But the last one was from the McDonalds where he and Flash had had lunch the day before. It must have been one of the girls who'd snickered at him, the ones he'd been standing right next to. It was cell phone video of Flash and he approaching and then stopping right beside them. Well, Flash was just past them and at the edge of the footage if at all in it. It was him in his ridiculous uniform from a foot away and it went on for a minute, looking at his . . at his package and then his butt from a foot away. And in the background, some of the girls' snickering remarks that he hadn't heard were more clearly audible. They were laughing at the size of the bulge between his legs and then at his buns and all along at his suit.

He was crestfallen. Toward the end of the video, which already had 18,000 views, one of the girls was heard snickering "that boy's wearing a dance belt, isn't he?" Kid Flash frowned at the screen. What the hell's that? He did a search of that term.

His jaw dropped. The freaky supporter that Flash had given him to wear was . . .? I've been . . . I've been wearing the same thing as ballet dancers wear . . ? In public!

He zipped out of the den and over to the kitchen where Flash was chopping onions and vegetables and putting them in a pot. As soon as Flash was done with the knife work, Kid Flash gave him a mild punch in the shoulder. He gestured downward, just below his waist.

"The freaky supporter you have me wearing is a dance belt?! You-you gave me ballet stuff to wear . . . in-in public?! No wonder I look so ridiculous!"

At first Flash only gave him a look that said he was acting foolish. But seeing that his protege wasn't calming down, he added, "Honestly, Kid Flash. I don't see why you're so upset. It's what we have to wear to minimize friction. Would you really expect to wear a regular jock and have that friction against the top of each thigh with every step, a million times as you run from here to Chicago? Besides that, I'm surprised at you. I thought you were an intellectual boy. Yet here you are outraged that something about you is associated with an expression of the arts. It comes across like silly schoolboy homophobia."

Kid Flash gulped. Now he felt guilty. His outrage was kind of like Stevie's stupid "Gay thought!" shouts, wasn't it?

"And it's a modified dance belt, anyway," added Flash. "It's not designed to lift as much as a regular one and it's worn lower from the waist, too."

Kid Flash sighed. Several moments passed and a breeze gently rustled the leaves outside the kitchen window. "Sorry. I just . . I'm still getting used to this.

A nod from Flash, a pat on the shoulder from Flash and Kid Flash shuffled out of the kitchen. He didn't complain again to Flash but he couldn't help grumbling to himself about the situation. He was only snapped out of his brief funk by the eventual return of Aunt Iris.

Before she stepped inside, he took one last look at his reflection in the glass front of a cabinet. Recriminations welled up but quickly faded away. Aunt Iris cam marching in in full Aunt Iris mode, giving a series of directions to Uncle Barry and laughing and handing a stack of bags and boxes to him.

"Go . . go on!" she told him, pushing him toward the guest room. "Get out of your superhero suit and put on some of the stuff that I got you! Go on!"

He grinned, as much as anything else at this woman of unassuming stature's ability to totally dominate two super speedsters. But he went into the guest room as directed. He pulled off his Kid Flash suit and started pulling on the clothes Aunt Iris had bought. There were socks, underwear, pants and shirts and at first Wally thought maybe Aunt Iris had accidentally given him things she'd bought for Uncle Barry. They were all so much bigger than his old clothes. But they weren't long enough to fit Uncle Barry. They were definitely for him. But, as he pulled on a pair of boxer shorts and then pants he wondered if they were for two of him. If his Kid Flash suit was humiliatingly form fitting, these new civilian clothes were the opposite, incredibly loose. He pulled on a sort of work shirt and then a pair of sneakers.

The sneakers fit his four sizes larger than they were Friday feet just right. He was swimming in everything else. He took a couple steps and the pants were already drooping down past his butt. But when he looked in the guest room mirror he could see the point of all of it. No one would have any idea what condition he was in under these clothes. He could be fat, just a little overweight, in good condition or impossibly speedsterized. No one could tell.

He stepped outside into the hall. "What do you think?" he asked Aunt Iris.

She nodded with an approving smile and circled around her nephew. "I like it!" she declared. "Okay, the whole grunge thing is like 20 years ago but you get echo fads all the time, little resurgences of something that. That's what you are. Oh, just one more thing!" she said and reached for some other bags on the counter. From one she produced a blood red knit hat with a yellow stripe. She approached and then smoothed down his orange hair.

"You have the most beautiful shiny hair, nephew."

His eyes reflexively went bashfully to the floor. As they did, Aunt Iris slipped the hat over his head and smoothed his hair down under it.

"But it's too distinctive. From here on out, the civilian you should always and I mean always wear a hat in public. Got it."

"Mmmm hmmm."

"Okay now, here's another rule for the short term. Maybe a month. Okay? Slouch."

"What?"

"Slouch," she said and pulled down on his shoulders. He didn't resist. "You're supposed to be just under five feet tall. You could have a growth spurt, but nobody has a 5 inches in 10 seconds growth spurt, okay? For the next month, you're under five feet tall. That Kid Flash guy is five four, okay?"

Wally nodded.

"I've got an idea about you and that Kid Flash boy," said Uncle Barry now also in civilian clothes and poking his head out from the kitchen. "I'll tell you after dinner."

Aunt Iris presided over dinner. While her husband and nephew ate ravenously, she expounded on her specialty, the press.

"I'm gonna teach you how things really work in the fourth estate," she said and gave a pat to her nephew's knit hat as he shoveled another forkful of casserole into his mouth.

"The fourth estate?" he managed to articulate past a mouthful of food.

"The fourth estate is the press. The term comes from the french revolution when they were trying to come up with categories for all walks of life. The press was designated the fourth estate, kiddo. Now listen and I'll explain to you how to deal with it," she said and Uncle Barry nodded to Wally. Listen to her. She knows.

"Okay, the first thing you have to realize is that the news is probably not what you think it is."

"Huh?"

"The news . . reporting . . it's not what you think it is. What do you think it is?" she nodded toward him solicitiing his opinion.

He shrugged his now plaid clad shoulders. "Giving people information that they can use to live their lives better?"

Aunt Iris chuckled. "Wrong! Not even close. Wally, the news is about . . the reporters. The news is about the guy at the desk reading the news to you."

"But . . that doesn't make any sense."

She shook her head and rolled her eyes. "Ya can't fight evil if you're hopelessly naive, Wally. What do reporters like that Cindy Summers or Bob Whatsisname on channel 7 want?"

Wally didn't even try to answer, afraid of how wrong he'd be this time. He shook his head. I don't know.

"They want their own careers to advance. That's all."

"Geez, Aunt Iris. That's kind of cynical."

"Realism is cynicism to the naive."

Wally didn't like to think of himself as naive. After all, he was a boy of the world now. He had seen the whole country, saved lives and caught crooks. But Aunt Iris knew her business.

"So . . what should I do with the press, the-the fourth estate?"

She draped one arm protectively over his shoulders. "Well, rule number one is to make their job easy. Have you ever noticed how often you hear about a baseball player or a football player who you thought was a really nice guy gets in trouble with the law, drunk driving or wife beating or something?"

"Yeah, there was that guy on Jump City's team who DUI'd just last week."

"And why did you think he was a nice guy?"

Wally shrugged. "I don't know. He always seemed like one."

"Because the press made him seem like one. And why? Because he made their job easy. Oh, some of the guys the press makes seem like nice guys actually are nice guys, like your uncle. But a lot of the time, the guys who get written up as good guys are just the ones who make the press's job easy and the ones who get made to look like . . assholes, pardon my french, are just guys who don't give interviews."

"So . . you're saying I should make sure to give interviews?"

"Not just that. Be friendly and say interesting things. Don't just mumble cliches under your breath. Look at-look at Batman. Batman ignores the press and they make him seem like he's just barely better than the villains in Gotham."

Wally nodded.

"Green Lantern talks to 'em but he does it like it's because they're holding a relative of his hostage at an undisclosed location. So, his press is barely better than Batman's."

He nodded some more.

"Don't ever lie to 'em. And feel free to say, 'I'm sorry but I can't talk about that' if they want information about your identity or someone else's or anything that you don't think you should tell 'em. But if you make their job easier then, magically, the general public all gets told that you're a good guy, you're a guy they'd like."

"Well, I-I definitely want people in Jump City to be friendly to me like everyone in Keystone is with Flash."

"And to do it you need the press to tell all the people that you'll never meet that, not only are you the fastest boy alive-"

He grinned.

"-and the handsomest boy alive-"

He looked down bashfully as she patted his knit hat covered head.

"-but one helluva good kid."

Aunt Iris went on for the rest of the meal and through dessert with capsule scouting reports of dozens of media figures local and national. Much of it was scandalous. Most of it was funny. Some of it shocked him.

"But . . didn't it hurt her career that her father was in the mob? I mean, didn't it bother ABC that they were hiring the daughter of a serious gangster?"

Aunt Iris laughed. "Apparently not."

"And that other one, the blond. She couldn't really be that dumb, could she?"

Aunt Iris rolled her eyes. "I was in her office once, miss network news show, ha! And one of her underlings didn't want to do something and got out of it by telling her that someone else would have to write up the cue cards for her because he was lefthanded and the only magic marker in the studio was one used by someone righthanded."

"What?"

"And she bought it! I watched her buzz another staffer on the intercom asking for a 'lefthanded marker'. What a ditz."

They shared a laugh before Wally circled back to something else she'd said.

". . so . . that little guy on MTV . . .?"

"Yeah. Watch out for him. You've heard the story about Speedy, right?"

Kid Flash shook his head. Then he started thinking. Does she mean . . ? Ohmygod!

His eyes went wide. She nodded.

"The . . the one with the funny haircut who thinks he's so clever, that one?."

His jaw dropped. Speedy was only a year or maybe just more than that older than him. How . .?

"You just be careful, kiddo. Don't do anything you don't want to do."

Wally nodded a dozen times in a half second.

That was about the end of Wally's first session of press training. With that, they carried their desserts into the living room and Uncle Barry, again, ran DVD episodes of the old Columbo tv show to give Wally training in thinking like a detective, pointing things out while Wally watched beside Aunt Iris. Just as in the episodes Uncle Barry had shown him the previous night, Lieutenant Columbo caught people who'd committed murders on the teeniest tiniest inconsistencies in their stories. Wally actually found he liked these shows.

But by the end of the second one, after a full day of physical and mental speedster training, he was tired.

Flash reminded him that he was supposed to be on a plane flying home at that very moment.

Wally's eyes went wide with alarm at first. I missed my flight!

But then he remembered. Wait a minute. I don't need any flight. I'm Kid Flash.

Uncle Barry sat down beside him on the couch. "Have you thought about what you're gonna tell your family?" he asked softly.

Wally let out a very long sigh. He shook his head. He hadn't considered it, not once. And he realized that maybe that said something.

"What should I do?" he finally asked.

"I think you have to ask, who do you trust with your life?" whispered Aunt Iris. "That's what's at stake, isn't it, Barry?"

Uncle Barry nodded.

"It's . . it's okay to not tell right away, too. Even if you think you should tell someone, it's okay to hold off for a bit and get used to the idea."

Wally nodded, deep in thought. No way could he tell his sister. Her whole school would know in five minutes. But, mom and dad? He sighed with the internal debate of the notion. It wasn't actually a debate. He immediately felt certain that a kid super hero would have to tell his parents. There wasn't any logical argument against this. They're your parents!

And yet . . it didn't feel quite right somehow. He had no words for it. He kept mulling it over as he put all his new clothes into a bag and then changed into his Kid Flash suit to run back west to Jump City. He only had to reach Jump City at about the same time as he would have gotten home from the airport. He had another hour. He could waste 59 minutes of that no problem. His parents weren't picking him up at the airport, anyway, just like they hadn't dropped him off. Aunt Iris was giving him money to get a van ride from the airport to home.

Even that little deception was wrong, wasn't it? He was sure it should feel wrong. They were his parents and he was tricking them. That had to be wrong. But it didn't feel that way. He ran these things through his mind while Flash was giving him some more super speedster instructions and going over what they would do the next day. Flash had come up with a great way to help protect his secret identity. Kid Flash watched as he made a couple phone calls and then tinkered with a piece of technology he said he'd gotten from J'onn J'onnz.

Kid Flash took it all in and yet in the back of his mind he was thinking about his family and about his friends. He wouldn't tell Aaron, Stevie and Jeff. That would be too many people. But why not Chan? Chan was completely trustworthy. Chan would never sell him out. But still, it was such a big thing.

Finally, he was ready to go. All his new clothes were compressed in a small duffel bag and he pulled both arms through its handles to wear it like a backpack. Aunt Iris gave him a kiss on the cheek and Uncle Barry promised to see him the next morning to carry out his plan. Kid Flash nodded and agreed to call them once he was back home in Jump City to confirm that he'd gotten home safely.

Then he was out the back of the house and onto the local roads and then interstates and less than 30 seconds later on the other side of the country. He found a spot in a small wooded lot just up the street from his house and changed into his extra loose clothes and red knit hat there. He stared a moment at the lightning bolt ring on his finger. The other outfit.

Then, remembering Aunt Iris's words, he adopted a deeply slouching shuffle to make his way from there to his house. He opened the door ready for everyone to realize how different he was right away.

"I'm back!"

His mother didn't even look. His father turned away from him. If not for his sister noticing his new clothes, no one would have noticed him at all. She was immediately right there in front of him snickering at him for being 20 years too late with the grunge look. He didn't say anything. His mother approached and sneered that "saintly Aunt Iris" must have bought them for him.

She did, Wally admitted.

His sister launched into a tantrum that Aunt Iris never bought her things. She bought giant chemistry sets and bunches of new clothes for Wally but nothing for her! And with that and tears that Wally didn't believe for even a second, she was off to her room.

Now, his mother approached closer and stared at him. She stared and stared. Wally was sure she could tell. Of course she can! She's my mother and all of a sudden my body's so . . different.

"You look ridiculous," she finally pronounced before turning and walking away. "But if saintly Aunt Iris wants to pay for you to look ridiculous, then let her," she mumbled under her breath.

Wally shuffled over to his tiny room surprised to find that he felt a bit crestfallen, a bit disappointed that she couldn't tell that he was now Kid Flash. But none of them could. He shuffled right past his father and his recovered from her theatrical tears sister later that night in getting a snack. They didn't notice.

Okay, he was slouching but even the shape of his face was slightly different with his instantaneous growth spurt and every ounce of fat on his body having been burned off.

Nope. Nothing.

He considered this laying on his bed waiting to fall asleep. And he also realized that he hadn't felt even close to telling them. The impulse hadn't crossed his mind at all. What did that mean?

He was still pondering this when finally someone did notice. He heard a loud purring sound at the window above him which meant that Empress, the neighbor's abyssinian cat was coming to visit. She jumped down from the window onto the bedspread over him and stopped. She turned her head to the side and sniffed.

"At least you noticed, Empress," he whispered and pet her down her back and then under her chin, eliciting louder purrs there in the dark. He could see Empress still standing on all fours atop him inspecting him.

"It's still me, though, Empress."

The little cat pronounced her acceptance of the new him by laying down on his chest, purring furiously for a minute and then abruptly going to sleep. Wally bunched up the covers at his sides so that he'd stay in place and not disturb her.

"I'm going to tell you something because I know I can trust you," he whispered. "I want to tell someone and I know you'll never tell anyone else. I'm Kid Flash."

Empress's eyes opened slightly and then closed in almost a knowing wink.


	8. First school day being two people

Wally woke up the next morning to the feeling of a weight moving off him and then an annoyed "Mrrow!" from Empress the neighbor's cat as she scrambled off the nice warm boy and up to the window.

"Sorry, Empress."

The cat gave him a feral look before jumping out the window.

He scrambled to the window. "I said I'm sorry."

The cat just kept going off through the yard back to her property.

Wally sighed. Okay, first day of being a super hero and having a secret identity at school. What do I do?

He thought about this for a moment and remembered that he was going to have to wear a specific outfit on this particular day. The hologram had been set up with him wearing a certain giant gray shirt and giant black pair of pants. He set those and his dark red hat aside.

He thought of all the flak he was going to get at school for suddenly showing up looking like . . grunge boy. But Flash and Aunt Iris said he had to. He mulled this over a bit and realized they were right. But, what would be the harm if he sort of transitioned to giant shirts and giant pants that didn't reveal anything about his new . . speedsterized body? That wouldn't be so bad, would it? Maybe alternate normal clothes and those for a week or two and then go to the new clothes more and more. Other kids would barely notice. Maybe Aaron, Jeff and Stevie would. Chan would absolutely notice. But he wouldn't get made fun of nearly so much.

He nodded slightly at his own logic. Yeah. That's what I'll do.

Aunt Iris had said he should put his old clothes in a bag and give them to Goodwill or the Salvation Army. Heck, that's where he'd gotten half of his stuff. But he'd forgotten to bag them up last night. Just as well. He might still be using them. Of course, he'd have to see if they still fit okay. After all, he was almost 5 inches taller now and his shoulders were wider and . . . He ran his hands down his sides and over his butt.

He sighed. Hmm. This wasn't any sure thing, was it? He couldn't wear that suit Aunt Iris had bought to fit the old Wally but that was a suit and it was some sort of european fit or something. Regular clothes wouldn't be like that.

Pop!

Rrrrip!

Rrrrip!

Pop!

Rrrip!

Wally tried on all his old clothes and nothing fit. He burst the rear seam on all five of his old pairs of pants. Three of them were going to be too short to wear with his longer legs, anyway. They all fit fine at the waist. Heck, they all had more room at the waist than they used to have. But he could barely get the zipper up on any of them and as soon as he did . . . rrrip!. His shirts looked odd, too. They didn't rip or tear or anything but they were a weird combination of tight around his more muscular shoulders and billowy loose around his tiny waist. His smaller wrists and forearms looked kind of ridiculous, too.

He ended up angrily throwing his pants in the trash and putting his shirts in a bag to go to the Salvation Army donations box feeling all the while like some sort of freak that normal clothes didn't fit him right. It was only after finishing those tasks and reminding himself that he was a better athlete than any normal kid could hope to be that the edge melted off his frustration.

He glanced at his battered alarm clock, another Salvation Army purchase. It was still only just after 7. He pulled on his ratty bathrobe and made his way to the bathroom. He went normal speed. Flash had cautioned him to not use his speed at home. And don't use it when dressed in civilian unless he was absolutely sure no one could see him. He wasn't sure whether his sister or parents were up yet so he just walked.

Once in the bathroom, he somehow thought of Wonder Girl and Bat Girl, idly wondering if they had to protect their secret identities at the school they went to. '

Tingle.

Bat Girl!

That Bat Girl booty!

Oh. Yeah.

Five minutes later he was finished gasping for breath as quietly as he could so as not to be heard outside the bathroom. He'd wanted to do it over the weekend at Aunt Iris and Uncle Barry's house thinking of the incredibly hot girls that he might now be able to date. But he couldn't do it at their house. It . . it was just too weird. But it had been days now since he'd pleasured himself. Days! Plural!

And maybe he would date Bat Girl or Wonder Girl. Maybe he would. He was a super hero now, not just nerd 6th grader Wally West whom they'd never notice. He was a Flash!

He mulled this over after flushing the tissues down the toilet and taking a piss.

He could have a whole new set of friends, super hero friends. Speedy, Green Arrow's sidekick. He seemed cool. Aqualad. He seemed smart and cool. Superboy. That little changeling dude with Doom Patrol. He'd be pal'ing around with all of them. Okay, not Robin. He seemed like a jerk. But why would all superheroes get along when all civilians don't?

He took a shower in 10 seconds, smiling afterward at what he could do with his super speed and then leaned in close to the mirror over the sink to check for whiskers. Damn. Still none.

He dried off, put on his robe and went back to his room. His father crossed his path going out the front door without saying a word to Wally. No "morning, son" no "have a good day" no "see you later, tiger". Nothing. Wally didn't break stride or give it a second thought. His father never said anything to him. This was the routine.

He got dressed in his new giant sized clothes and pulled his dark red knit hat down low so that none of his orange hair showed. Then he obeyed the deep rumble from his stomach and went to get some breakfast.

Only in his case it was breakfasts. He felt like he could easily eat a whole box of cereal. But he tried to play it low key. He had only had three bowls. Still, his mother and sister gave him the evil eye more and more with each spoonful. Finally after the third bowl, his mother went into her usual, "You're gonna eat us out of house and home!" spiel while his sister laughed. So dumb. What was the difference between house and home? Could he eat them out of the house but not the home? What?! And what was he supposed to do?! He was hungry.

"I'm hungry," he shrugged.

"Well, this is gonna stop," his mother vaguely threatened, waving her hand at him and the box of cereal as he put it away with his sister snickering all the while.

A minute later he was out the door. He went down the street then across the railroad tracks then up the hill through the woods to the rich neighborhoods where Aaron, Jeff, Stevie and Chan all lived.

When his buddies saw him in black pants and gray shirt big enough for at least two of him and a red knit hat, they first stared. Then they shook their heads. Then they started with the jokes.

Of course he couldn't tell them why he was wearing these new clothes. But he came up with a plausible story. He needed new clothes because he was outgrowing his old clothes and his mother made him get these because it would be a looooong time before he'd ever outgrow clothes like these that could fit two of him at once.

His pals bought it. Why not? They knew his family was insanely cheap about spending money on him. They kept on making jokes but there wasn't that suspicious tone to their remarks. There was a sort of acceptance.

Of course, it all started over again with other kids at school. But he wasn't going to tell anyone else about his crazy cheap family. He got enough grief about being the poorest boy in school. He just took it and let it all roll off his back. In homeroom and for the first class, he was, to his great annoyance, the big topic of discussion.

"Oh my god, look at West! Frigging nerd's gone grunge on us! Ahahahaha! Only like 20 years late, brainiac."

He just sighed and took it. Flash had made a big point of that. It'll help protect your secret identity if you don't fight back, Kid Flash, if you let other kids make fun of you. They won't think of somebody like that as a super hero.

He was surprised that the other kids didn't see something different about him. Okay, he wasn't in his impossibly tight red and yellow uniform but didn't they see that his face was sort of different? More cheekbones, more jaw. Nobody sees this?!

But then everyone's focus changed. It switched to super heroes. The school principal suddenly came onto the intercom system speaking into every room at once and announced that there was going to be a school assembly the last class of the day and Flash was going to be there with his new sidekick, Kid Flash to address all the kids.

The girls shrieked with excitement. Boys shouted "Kewl!" and "Awesome!". It totally ruined that first class. None of the teachers could get their classes to pay attention at all that first class. Wally and Chan laughed at Mr. Grebek trying, in vain, to get everyone to focus on his stupid algebra when no one wanted to. People! People! Come on now, people! Pee-pull!

The furor barely subsided through the course of the day before building again in the afternoon. The Flash, a freaking Justice League member is coming to our school! And Kid Flash, too!

It seemed to Wally that only a third or a half of the kids had ever heard of Kid Flash. He heard questions being asked and saw kids passing around smart phones with pictures from youtube and news clips. Though he was mortified that some boys snickered at another boy wearing some "gay ass suit", he was immensely pleased that the girls seemed to be excited. He heard muffled assessments of his Flash suit clad self that all sounded very positive. Some girls giggled the way that excited young girls giggle when they really like something. One blond 8th grade girl made a sort of moaning sound with a big smile on her face. That was a new one on Wally. He liked it. He liked it very much.

He wasn't sure what his reaction should be. He tried to remember what Peter Parker ever said about Spiderman in the comic books. But he couldn't recall. So, for now he didn't say anything.

But he couldn't just monitor how everyone was reacting to the idea of seeing Flash and Kid Flash. By mid-morning he was having trouble thinking of anything but food. He was soooo hungry. Then, when lunch finally rolled around, he realized he'd only brought enough money for one school lunch with him. As he went through the cafeteria line with his tray, he tried softly pleading with the old women in hair nets on the other side of the stainless steel serving areas to give him more. He was embarassed to find himself begging for one old woman to shake more lima beans off the serving spoon. But they all told him he'd have to pay more to get more. He sighed. He only had money for one lunch. He made his way to the table where Aaron, Jeff, Stevie and Chan were sitting. He wolfed down his food while listening to them talk about Flash and Kid Flash.

He figured he would normally have said something so he didn't just satisfy his curiosity as to what his friends were saying about him in his other identity. He told Aaron, Jeff and Stevie that he had met Flash that weekend. The talk at the table stopped.

"Really?!" came the response in stereo.

"Uh huh. I was visiting my Uncle Barry. He's a police scientist in Keystone City. He's met Flash a bunch of times on his job, well, maybe five or six."

The others looked at Chan, his best friend. Is he bullshitting us? Or is this true? You'd know. Chan nodded. They asked what he was like. Wally said that he was really cool. He seemed really smart too and he's in incredible condition.

They asked if he'd met Kid Flash, too. Wally claimed that he had but that Flash's sidekick had only stopped by for like two seconds. They were going to go training or something. He was considering saying more but was completely distracted by Aaron's low whining about his mom having packed an avocado with his lunch. Aaron didn't like avocados for whatever reason. Wally leaned forward and asked if he could have it and barely suppressed his reaction of joy when Aaron said he could.

The conversation went on to Jump City's baseball team and then Pruneface's, Mrs. Cadwallader's, homework. Wally was taking part like usual with his buddies when another kid at their table turned his nose up at the pyramid of lima beans in one cell of his lunch tray. Wally offered to take them. The kid laughed and said "sure". To his pals' surprise, Wally stepped over behind that kid who upturned his otherwise empty tray pouring a handful of lima beans into Wally's hands. To call them lima "beans" was actually charitable. They'd been at a dry corner of the serving pan on the lunch line. They were lima rocks or lima pebbles. Wally chewed them all and swallowed is if he'd just crossed the desert and they were the first food he'd seen in days.

He saw the glances going around among Chan, Aaron, Jeff and Stevie.

"What?" he barely got out through a mouthful of food.

"Dude," asked Chan. "Since when are you so hyped about lima beans?"

Wally shrugged timidly. "I'm . . I'm really hungry." And then added, "I read somewhere that this is what happens before you have a big growth spurt, you get really hungry."

His pals half went along with that. It seemed a smart thing to say. Now five foot four and change, he'd been slouching as much as he could shuffling through the halls in school so that he still seemed to be just short of five feet tall. After not even one full day of it, he found it extremely annoying. But it was absolutely necessary, especially that day. It was of supreme importance that Wally West was still seen as his same old less than five foot tall self on that day.

It was all part of the plan. Flash had a plan. And it would emphasize that superhero Kid Flash and junior high school student Wally West were clearly different people. How could they not be? They'd stood side by side!

This was Flash's plan and it would work like a charm. Kid Flash had grinned at how clever it was. This would go a long way toward protecting his secret identity. Still, there was a small part of his thoughts where he almost wished that kids in or teachers had denied it, had seen that he had the qualities of a superhero in him, that he had the body of a super speedster. But no one did.

Flash had worked out the plan the previous day. And they'd immediately started preparing the hologram of a four foot eleven inch tall Wally in his new giant sized clothes. It had been very simple. Flash had sped to the crime lab and then back home with the martian somavision, J'onn J'onnz's super MRI machine. Then he'd had Wally dress up in his new clothes. He had him stand in the center of the metal circle, then raised it up over his head and dropped it down so that it took is ultra-detailed pictures down to the last cell of him.

Flash wasn't going to use all the internal organ data, here's your liver, here's your spleen etc . . But he knew that the martian somavision created a fantastic set of data that could be fed into another piece of martian high tech, the martian hologram. After entering the martian somavision data into his computer, Flash had filmed Wally, sitting on a low chair, about as high as the first row of the stands beside the Junior High's basketball court. He filmed Wally sitting there for 15 minutes, fidgeting, shifting on his seat, breathing, sighing etc.

Then, he entered that film into his computer. First he made some strategic modifications to the martian somavision version of Wally. He scaled holo-Wally down from five foot four to four foot eleven. Then he changed his face. As he explained to Wally, biometric computer comparisons were very precise nowadays. It would seem odd if Kid Flash was pictured standing next to a boy whose face was an *exact* copy of his, even if he was smaller. So, he made holo-Wally's nose smaller and flattened it a bit. He moved his eyes slightly closer together. He made his lips thinner and removed the cleft of his chin. Finally, he made holo-Wally's hair even brighter than it actually was and dusted his nose and cheeks with freckles.

At last, the seemingly interminable school day was almost over, there was only one class left. The principal's voice came over the intercom instructing 8th graders to proceed to the gym. Wally's thoughts swirled as he waited for the notice for 6th graders. How was this going to go? He'd have to be seen by all his friends at fairly close distance in his impossibly tight Kid Flash suit with only the dude-thong thing, a dance belt, on underneath. Some kids would laugh at him. He felt sure of it. He remembered some boys seeing the youtube videos of Kid Flash and snickering at his "gay ass suit".

But these worries melted away. There were bigger stakes involved than whether or not he was embarassed. He'd already saved at least 13 lives. He'd save a hell of a lot more in the future but he had to protect his identity to keep doing it and this was a big part of that. Besides, the girls had all loved the way he looked.

When the principal's voice came over the intercome telling the 6th graders to proceed to the gym, he was ready. He knew what he had to do. First, he had to upset Mrs. Cadwallader, Pruneface, the english teacher. Of course, it had to be just right. He didn't want to get sent to detention hall while the assembly was going on, forced to site in front of that jerk Mr. Vosc who was known to casually slap kids on the back of the head. Otherwise, that would have been perfect. But he couldn't have anyone hitting him, not if it was only a hologram of him in that seat. But Mrs. Cadwallader was known to single out kids who were acting "too rambunctious", as she put it and separate them from their pals and make them sit next to her in the front row of the stands at assemblies in the gym.

He started a wrestling match with Chan as they were going down the hallway past her and made sure to bump into her but not too hard. It had exactly the right effect. Mister West! Yadda yadda yadda, he had to sit next to her during the assembly, not with Chan, Aaron, Jeff and Stevie at the back where they'd be laughing and joking with each other no matter what the assembly was.

He shuffled into the gym and took a seat beside her. The crowd was electric with anticipation at seeing Flash and his new sidekick. Wally faked a sneeze and when he did he pulled the tiny martian hologram projector from his pocket and glued it to the front of the bench seat where he sat.

Three . .

Two . .

One . .

He leaned back, actually he threw himself back at super speed while vibrating so that he passed right through stands and landed in a crouch amongst some electric cables on the hardwood floor underneath the stands. He glanced quickly. He saw a fantasically real looking hologram of him sitting next to Mrs. Cadwallader. He watched a few moments more. Nothing. No one had noticed anything.

Now, the easy part, he thought.

He vibrated through the wall behind him and into the locker room. As he'd hoped, it was completely empty. He instantly stripped and then pulled on his Kid Flash suit. He swept his orange hair back the way it always was as Kid Flash. Then, he stuffed his clothes in an empty locker and vibrated through a couple more walls and outside the building from where he sped to the arranged meeting point a few blocks away.

An instant later, Flash sped to his side and halted.

"Is it in place, Kid Flash?"

"Yes sir."

"Okay, then take this," he said producing, from under his glove, what looked like a white coated candy, a skittle or a mentos.

"What's that?"

"Chew on it and it'll make your voice sound at least one if not two whole octaves lower for a half hour."

Kid Flash liked the idea of that. He quickly chewed and then spoke. "More martian tech?" he asked, or perhaps Barry White's illegitimate white son had asked. His voice sounded great. Really deep.

"No. Those are Batman's. Come on, let's go."

First they went and met the principal in the main office. Flash went first and introduced him As he shook his hand, Kid Flash intentionally mispronounced his name in his new extra deep voice. This was both fun and added to the impression that he didn't know him.

"Nice to meet you, Principal Dumbass," he rumbled in his temporary voice.

"That's doomass, young man," he corrected.

"Oh, sorry."

Kid Flash thought dumbass fit. He'd been called to the guy's office just three days ago. Here he was with a mask only half covering his face and his hair swept back instead of just sort of doing whatever and the guy had no idea it was him. He almost laughed. Dumbass.

Flash went over the expected sequence of things. Fifteen minutes of the last class had already been eaten up just getting kids into the gym. The principal would go first and speak for a few minutes about how important education was. Then he'd introduce Flash who'd introduce Kid Flash. They they'd take over.

Flash nodded. They shook hands again and the principal walked off to the gym. When he opened the door to the main office, you could hear all the kids chanting, "WE WANT THE FLASH! WE WANT THE FLASH!"

Kid Flash could tell when the principal entered the gym because there were a lot of boos. He grinned. He was sure that Chan, Jeff and Stevie were shouting boos down on him as he would have if he'd been there. He looked around the office. He'd been sent here a few different times by teachers mad at him. It looked weirdly smaller now. And the fact that he was standing there practically naked, only wearing the ridiculous red and yellow body coating of a uniform only made it seem more weird.

After a minute or two, Flash waived for him to follow him out into the hall and he did. They ambled down the main hall toward the gym at normal speed. Mr. Bingham, one of the teachers he most disliked, a jerk who practically cultivated brown-nosing suckups in his classes and the school clubs he ran, was at the end of the first hallway that led into the gym. Bingham immediately started sucking up to Flash in a bizarrely hyper voice. Oh my god. What an honor! All the lives you saved! So powerful. Blah blah blah.

Everything's a suckup relationship to him, isn't it, thought Kid Flash as he slightly shook his head.

"And is this your new sidekick protege?" he gestured to Kid Flash.

"If I'm not, it's a mystery why I'm dressed like this."

Bingham went into convulsions of laughter and, thankfully, after shaking hands with him and a few other teachers, all of whom were clueless that it was him, Wally West, they heard the principal introducing Flash.

"And now, without further ado, the hero of Keystone City, the fastest man alive, the Flash!"

There was thunderous cheering inside the gym. Flash did a circuit of the gym fast enough to be a red blur and then stopped beside the principal at the microphone in the center of the gym. Kid Flash advanced to the end of the other end of the hallway, the entrance to the gym. There were teachers and students all around him there. But first he zipped down to the locker room and came back with two basketballs. He handed them to a teacher near the gym entrance. He told her that they'd call for them in a few minutes at which time she should just throw them out onto the court.

He sighed and waited another minute while Flash thanked the principal and talked about the programs he was involved with in Keystone City to encourage kids to stay in school. While listening, Kid Flash glanced around. Two girls to his right were both clearly checking him out and looking like they might go into convulsions at any moment.

"Hi," he offered in his new deep bass voice. They froze in place.

Over his left shoulder he saw Freddy Simmons, the sixth grade's only sort of openly gay boy and only boy sort of openly taking ballet classes taking camera phone pictures of him.

He sighed and rolled his eyes. Practically naked and I have to stand here right next to people gawking at me.

At last Flash wound up his words with ". . and now, I'd like to introduce a young man who also has super speed and who'll mostly be patrolling in the Jump City area. Ladies and gentlemen . . Kid Flash!"

Kid Flash was relieved to speed through the edge of the crowd and then run a circuit of the gym faster than Flash had, only a faint red and yellow blur to the eye. The kids were going crazy at this point, cheering and shouting. It took several moments after he'd stopped beside Flash for them to quiet down enough for either to be heard even through the microphone.

"Now . . now, Kid Flash."

"Yes, Flash?" he responded and he thought a series of gasps went up from the girls in the stands at the sound of his deep voice.

"One of the things I've learned over time is that somehow no one completely believes that you or I have super speed."

"Really?"

"Yes. They always need a demonstration, some kind of trick to prove it."

"But, what can we do in this small space, this basketball court?"

"Hmm. Well . . it is a basketball court, so . . . "

Kid Flash had worked it out in advance. Flash had suggested to him that they should do some sort of trick to prove their super speed. Kid Flash had immediately suggested the one he was now going to do. He didn't tell Flash that the 8th grade stars of the school's basketball team, Ty Williams and Dave Cavanaugh, a black kid and a white one, were the two jerks who most often picked on him, Chan, Aaron, Jeff and Stevie.

Flash asked if someone could throw out a couple basketballs and the teacher by the hallway complied.

"And, Principal Dumas gave me the names of two boys that he says are your best basketball players." He produced a small piece of paper from under one glove. "Will a Ty Cavanaugh, no, sorry, Ty Williams. Will a Ty Williams and a David Cavanaugh please come down to the court."

Kid Flash barely suppressed a grin as the two tall jerks made their way down the stands from where the 8th graders were seated to the court. Kid Flash tossed each one a basketball. Actually he threw it at each of them very fast. Neither one caught it cleanly but each gathered in his basketball. Flash directed Williams to a spot 10 feet from one basket and Cavanaugh 10 feet from the one on the opposite side of the gym. He instructed them, on the count of three to simultaneously put up a shot which Kid Flash would try to block.

The two jerks looked at each other and smirked. They were 80 feet apart. He was 50 feet from either of them. The little one couldn't possibly get both of them. Could he even get one of them? He was standing, casually, with his hands clasped behind his back in front of Flash at midcourt right in front of the scorer's table.

"Three . . two . . one, shoot!"

Only after Flash had said 'shoot' did Kid Flash take off, wanting to make clear that he hadn't cheated. He poured on the speed heading for Williams first and actually had to wait for the ball to leave his hand. He caught it just two feet from Williams' hands and threw it back, hard, off the side of his head then immediately turned on the speed even harder and made a beeline for Cavanaugh. Cavanaugh's shot had left his hand but barely and Kid Flash leaped and caught it half way to the basket and threw it back right off his forehead.

To the crowd watching, there was a blur of red and yellow punctuated by two pingy sounds as Williams then Cavanaugh had their shots thrown back off their own heads and then the two of them were doubled over yelping as the crowd roared its approval of this trick as the basketballs ricocheted off into the stands.

Kid Flash returned to Flash at the microphone.

"Sorry guys," he chuckled and Williams and Cavanaugh retreated back into the stands, their metaphorical tails between their legs.

"How about another one?" suggested Flash.

"Okay."

"Principal Dumas, why don't you come forward."

Principal Dumas laughed, shook his head and waived his hands. He could be heard shouting that he didn't play basketball. The entire crowd urged him forward to get a ball blocked off his head. At the microphone, Flash assured him that he wouldn't need to play basketball or do anything. He directed the principal to the center of the court. Then, Kid Flash approached at a walk. The principal flinched and the crowd roared. Then Kid Flash sped off from the spot where he stood and started circling around the principal. To the kids and teachers watching he made a blur that was red on the bottom and yellow on the top, just like his uniform and then a second later, the principal, with a look of shock on his face, lifted into the air. Stray pieces of paper were sucked into a rising column of air. The principal slowly rose higher and higher, as the crowd roared, his expression a mix of terror and pleasant surprise. He rose nearly to the gym roof before Kid Flash slowed his pace and gradually let him down back onto his feet.

The crowd applauded and Flash asked, from the microphone, if the Principal accepted that Kid Flash had super speed. The Principal nodded emphatically then returned to the edge of the crowd.

Flash spoke for another few minutes reiterating his message about the importance of education, "I hope this has been fun but the mission of this school is deadly serious . . etc, etc" urging kids to stay in school. Then he turned the microphone over to Kid Flash.

"First, I want to thank everybody for inviting us to your school. And I want to say that I'll be doing my best to help save lives in the Jump City area and around the country along with Flash. Everything won't immediately be a complete success but I'll always be trying to help. I'll always give you my best. I hope folks in Jump come to regard me the way the folks in Keystone regard Flash. Thank you."

The crowd applauded and Kid Flash smiled. He ran one gloved hand through his orange hair. He glanced at Holo-Wally sitting just a few feet away with his even brighter orange hair mostly under his red knit hat.

"Maybe, if I do really well, redheads won't be afraid to show it in public," he chuckled and took one step back and reached and pulled the hat off 'Wally West' in the front row.

"Hey!" the smaller sixth grader shouted. "Give that back!" and he lunged once, twice and a third time for his hat but Kid Flash held it out of reach before finally tossing it back in the little redhead's face. The crowd laughed as nerdy Wally West pulled his hat back down over his head and sat back down.

Flash took the microphone and, again, urged kids to stay in school before turning the mike over to the Principal again. With waves, he and Kid Flash saluted the crowd and then sped off.

They vibrated right through the side wall of the gym and then out to the street. Flash patted his shoulder.

"Good job. Now go back and finish."

Kid Flash nodded then sped back into the school. He vibrated through a couple walls and into the locker room. It was still empty. He pulled off his Kid Flash uniform and put his oversized clothes back on then vibrated through the wall to the space under the stands. A second later he was sitting on the bench seat next to Mrs. Cadwallader and had turned off the hologram generator and put it in his pocket.

Kids were leaving the gym now. Up behind him he could see Chan and the others. He waved to them.

"I'll be right there," he shouted trying to make his voice higher but finding that he didn't have to do much because the mentos or whatever it was from Batman was wearing off. But, to his exasperation, Prune Face, Mrs. Cadwallader grabbed his sleeve and insisted that he stand there and listen to her lecture him about "tomfoolery" in the hallways. She went on and on and by the time he could get free of her Chan and the others had left the gym. He wanted to curse at her but only ran off at a plausible pace.

He wasn't sure which way they had gone and hurried off one way at normal speed but found himself in an almost empty hallway at one end of the school. Who should appear but Ty Williams and Dave Cavanaugh? Wally could not resist gloating, especially as he had been the one to humiliate them.

He pointed at them and laughed. "Ahaha! That was great seeing you two jerks each eat a basketball!"

He knew he should have run as soon as he saw them. He could have gotten away but he couldn't resist. Neither could they.

They rushed at him and grabbed him. Wally struggled. He could have vibrated his body and made his skin seem as hot as a bright orange stove burner to the jerks holding him. He could have hit each of them a hundred times in a second and made them let go. He could have done any number of things. He was Kid Flash, fastest boy alive. But on a day practically devoted to protecting his secret identity, he couldn't ignore Flash's words that it would help if kids at school continued to pick on him.

He put up as much firght as he thought Wally West should but got summarily stuffed down a tall waste basket. It was one of those three foot high ones and it was easy to stuff him down it because he'd somehow become incredibly flexible when he got super speed. So, there he was with his butt on some trash down near the bottom and his head and sneakers sticking out the top of the waste basket with the soles of his sneakers facing toward the ceiling with the toes of his sneakers almost against his lips.

He grunted with the effort to try to free himself but couldn't get anywhere as just Wally West.

Williams and Cavanaugh were almost rejuvenated, getting past their own humiliation by having humiliated someone else. They laughed and got some other kids to come down the hall and see what they'd done to that little nerd West. A half dozen other kids surrounded him laughing. Wally gritted his teeth and pleaded for them to let him go knowing they wouldn't. Everyone marveled that they'd been able to stuff the little brainiac so securely in there that he was practically eating the tips of his sneakers. Someone pulled his hat down over his face to another surge of laughter and then the crowd of jerks was gone.

Wally shook his head. The shit I have to go through . . !

He knew he could get out of there no sweat with just a little vibration but just as the sounds of footsteps were all receding, one set started getting louder. Someone was approaching. Damn.

"Wally! Wally, are you okaaaaay?"

Wally rolled his eyes beneath his knit hat. It was the distinctive nasal whine of Freddie Simmons.

"Oh my god," he heard the voice circling around the trash can, urgency now gone. "You-you must be incredibly flexible. Does that hurt?"

"No it . . just get me out of this, Freddie, please!"

Freddie tipped the wastebasket over, put his foot against one corner of it and pulled till Wally slowly unfolded, emerging from it.

Wally stood up and fixed his hat. "Thanks, Freddie." He started toward an exit.

"We're even now, huh, Wally?" asked Freddie now beside him.

Wally sighed. "Sure, Freddie. We're even."

"Oh, come onnnnn!" pleaded Freddie. "You stopped those assholes from beating me up after the ballet performance three weeks ago and now I got you out of there."

"Okay, Freddie."

"So . . you wanna kiss again?" whispered Freddie.

Wally punched Freddie's arm.

"Okaaay! Okaaay!"

Wally sighed. It would be so much easier if I was a jerk.

Three weeks before, the "Culture Friday" performance in the school auditorium had been ballet. Some of the stupider jerk 8th graders had somehow wanted to beat up the school's only boy known to be taking ballet class, Freddie Simmons. Wally had run to his defense outside the school when it looked like a half dozen much bigger kids might really hurt him. He'd absorbed half the punishment and luckily an old man walking by on the sidewalk had run up the grass shouting and pulled kids off the pile. Wally had walked Freddie to his house just a block away and helped him inside the door. Freddie stood there a second looking at Wally in a way Wally didn't quite get. The next thing he knew, Freddie was half jumping at him and, pure horror, had his lips on Wally's. He couldn't get free for a few seconds because Freddie fell on top of him and, oh god, tongues! He finally pushed Freddie away, asking what the hell he was thinking. But his anger at Freddie was diminished by seeing how Freddie flinched in response. He turtled and covered his head and pleaded. He was terrified now. He realized that Freddie expected him to now be the one beating the crap out of him. A wave of pity for Freddie washed over him. He assured him he wouldn't hit him but made sure to add that he had *not* wanted to kiss him. And he got Freddie to promise never to tell anyone about it.

"Come on," said Wally pointing to an exit door now in sight. "Let's get out of here."

But they had just left the school and gotten to the sidewalk when the skies opened and it started raining hard. Wally was going to go to the right but Freddie shouted for him to follow him to his house in easy running distance just 50 yards away. Wally rolled his eyes and followed Freddie running faster than Freddie but at a certainly plausible pace.

He was going to remain under the overhang that just protected someone at the front step of Freddie's house but the rain was being blown by the wind now and Freddie told him it was stupid to remain outside. He reluctantly admitted that it was and went inside with him.

"Don't worry. I won't kiss you again . . . unless you really want me to," Freddie smirked.

Wally glared at him.

"Have you kissed any other boys?"

"I didn't kiss you, Freddie. You kissed me," said Wally now looking out the window next to the door as the rain kept pouring down. Behind him, Freddie was putting things away.

"Well . . have you kissed any girls?"

"That's none of your business, Freddie."

"So, you haven't!"

Wally ground his teeth.

"You know, you have a really unusual tongue, Wally," muttered Freddie and then he laughed at Wally's exasperation.

"Almost electric."

Wally thought of just making a run for it but it was raining so hard that it would look ridiculous. No one would go out there when it was raining so hard.

Behind him, Freddie laughed. "Wa-lly! I'm only kidding. I like you but after what I saw today . . !" he burst into laughter.

Wally turned around, not sure what Freddie was saying. He saw Freddie loading something into a laptop computer.

"He's an instant gay icon!" crowed Freddie.

"What?!"

"Kid Flash . . stupid!"

"I'm not . . . sure, I mean, I don't think he's gay, Freddie."

"Who cares?" chuckled Freddie. "That body! Those-those buns!" he burst into laughter that faded into a flurry of typing.

"What are you doing?"

"I'm sending my pictures in to Instant gay icon dot com."

"What's that?" asked Wally in horror.

"It's a site with pictures of only the most insanely hot guys."

"But . . what if Kid Flash doesn't want to be considered a-a gay icon?"

Freddie laughed. "He doesn't have a choice. He's insanely hot. His-his package was like an optical illusion."

Wally glanced down at himself, brow deeply furrowed.

"So . . . this is just part of the deal that he's gonna have to accept, is that it?"

"I suppose," said Freddie with a final burst of typing and then he sat back in his chair in satisfaction with his arms folded.

Wally shrugged. Over Freddie's shoulder he could see a tray of rice crispies squares on the kitchen counter.

He pointed. "Freddie? Could . . . I have a couple of those?"

Freddie shrugged. Sure.

Wally went quickly into the kitchen and saw that Freddie had his back to him. He wolfed down four of them and kept another in his hand as he went past Freddie back to the door offering a "thanks" as he went by. And a minute later the rain abated. Wally said 'bye' then ran off down the street toward his pals' houses.


	9. Chan's moving Is Wally becoming fatty?

Wally ran down the street from Freddie's house and turned left. He was anxious to see his buddies again and caught himself running way too fast for Wally West, Usain Bolt fast. He slowed to a typical 12 year old boy's pace with a sigh. It was so easy to run fast now and so hard to just run slow.

He got to the end of the street, hung another left and kept going. Flash had said he shouldn't tell any of his friends. But the more he thought about it the more he started to believe that Chan would know. He'll figure it out. He'll know that something's very different about me. The trick with the hologram at school would fool all the jerks who make fun of me and the people who don't know me, but this is Chan, my best friend. Aaron, Stevie and Jeff might not figure it out but Chan knows me better than they do. We do everything together-at least we did up till now.

As Wally kept jogging along at a tortoise-like sprint, he considered this some more and became convinced that Chan would figure it out. He glanced down at his feet while avoiding some cracked pavement.

My sneakers! Chan gives me his half worn out sneakers. Up till Friday, we both wore size 5. So, if he stands next to me he's not gonna notice that my feet are suddenly much bigger than his, that I wear size 9 today? And if he hands me the game controls he's not gonna notice that my hands are suddenly a lot bigger than they were just a few days ago?! Even my face is different. My jaw looks bigger and my cheekbones show more. He's gonna know something's up. And if we hit pause to go take a piss, when we're both standing there whizzing, he's not gonna notice that mine's not just a little bigger now, it's-it's fricking porn star sized?! He's not gonna notice that?! Come on. Even just being next to him on the floor, the two of us using his games, he might notice that my shoulder's a lot more muscular. Or that I'm extra warm now, my body temperature two degrees higher than before.

Dude, he imagined Chan saying through a skeptical squint. What's with you? Are you burning up?

He ran along at an irritatingly slow pace feeling calm about the whole identity thing now. Maybe not immediately but within a few days, Chan'll know. And I won't have to agonize about telling him or not. He'll figure it out.

Wally smiled. Good. He didn't want to lie to Chan. He questioned himself a moment for this in light of his being willing to lie to his family but shrugged it off. He and Chan didn't keep secrets from each other. It wasn't some girl thing where it was oh so important and they whispered special information and gasped at its implications. They would casually blurt things out to each other just to not have to bother with the whole stupid "secret" aspect of anything.

After Chan's mother had made a cryptic remark about not acting like his sister, Chan rolled is eyes and told Wally, "My older sister's crazy. At least that's the way my parents talk about it. She goes to raves and gets mediocre grades and it drives them nuts. So they put even more pressure on me."

The subject of punishment came up and Wally told Chan about how his mother would spank his butt with her oversized hairbrush. Chan told him how his parents had "washed his mouth out with soap" actually made him keep a piece of soap in his mouth for 15 minutes after he'd used the word "asshole" to describe the junior high's principal in front of his grandmother. Better to just say these things and get them over with than bother with a whole stupid secrecy thing about them. Wally and Chan were united in that perspective.

At last, Wally turned down a cul de sac street and ran to the third house on the left, up its driveway to the front door. He rang the bell at Aaron's house in case the guys had all stopped there. Aaron's mom came to the door and didn't recognize him at first. He glanced quick at his reflection in the glass panel beside the door and gave a sigh of relief. No, he was slouching like he was supposed to. Aaron's mom was just taken aback by Wally wearing oversized clothes instead of the expected chinos and good boy clothes. She said that the guys weren't there but wasn't sure whether they'd gone to Stevie's house or Chan's.

Wally tried at Stevie's where there was no answer and then went along to Chan's where Chan's mom let him in. She gave him a long, circumspect look as she did so. Wally raced up to Chan's room where he found Stevie, Aaron and Jeff, too.

"Hey guys."

"Where've you been?" asked Chan, falling back into a chair at the side of his room. Aaron was in another chair. Stevie and Jeff lay across his bed playing a video game on the screen at the side of the room.

"Prune face made me wait and then I . . I got stuffed in a trash can by Williams and Cavanaugh."

The others all rolled their eyes before Stevie broke out into guffaws. "Hahaha. Wasn't that great seeing Kid Flash reject both their shots back in their ugly faces?"

Nods all around.

"Yeah, well it seems they don't want to hear anyone remind them about it."

"Dude? You laughed at 'em about Kid Flash humiliating 'em?" asked Aaron.

Wally nodded with a grin, now over at the side of the room by Chan. Everyone laughed. Williams and Cavanaugh soooo completely had it coming.

Eventually, the conversation turned to the assembly and Flash and Kid Flash.

"You can do crossfit and PX90 and any freaking thing you want for 12 hours a day and you won't be in shape like Flash," declared Stevie shaking his head. "Holy shit."

Nods all around.

"What about Kid Flash?" muttered Wally.

Jeff snickered. "That suit! It's like a full body speedo, maybe worse!"

Chuckles all around. Wally glanced furtively at his friends, anxious to know what they thought of the other him. "Is it . . any worse than Flash's?" Wally muttered. "And, he looks like he's in just as good shape as Flash."

Stevie shook his head not in answer but at the question. "No, the suit's not any worse but he's a freaking kid. What is he, like a-a seventh grader or an eighth grader and he's wearing that-that . . ?!"

"Gay ass suit." Aaron finished the sentence for him. Wally frowned angrily at Aaron, the wimpiest of the five of them making fun of Kid Flash.

"And he might not beeeeee gay," said Stevie, "But if keeps wearing that suit, it'll make him gay."

Laughs all around. Wally did his best fake chuckle. No one was paying too much attention and it got by. He wasn't sure how to play this. Should he defend Kid Flash? Could he? Is it clearly enough established that he's not Kid Flash in the minds of everyone at school tht he can do that?

"Oh come on, a-a uniform can't make you gay," he finally mumbled. Not even mine, he thought to himself.

"That one might," laughed Jeff. "I think it was tighter than what the ballet dude was wearing three weeks ago. Besides, why should you defend him? He made fun of you in front of the whole school."

Wally shrugged. "I just don't see how his suit makes him gay if Flash's doesn't make him gay."

"Because Flash looks like he could be faster than Usain Bolt even if he didn't have a super power. Kid Flash is barely bigger than us." explained Chan. "That's why it's okay for Flash to dress like that but not freaking Kid Flash."

Wally wasn't sure what to say and just let the issue drop. But he knew it wouldn't be the last time that Kid Flash would meet with a reaction of derision for being his age and wearing such an impossibly tight uniform.

The afternoon want along pretty much like normal except that he had this incredible secret this whole other undercurrent to his entire life now. Aaron, Jeff and Stevie left Chan's a little after 5 but Wally hung around.

He saw Chan looking at him kind of oddly and perked up. He wasn't sure why then he felt a wave of excitement. He's figured it out! That must be it. He's gonna ask! He's figured it out already!

But, finally, Chan gave a sigh and turned off the videogame.

"Hey! I was winning."

How could he not win when he could press the buttons impossibly fast.

"Wally . . dude. I've gotta tell you about something."

"You've gotta tell me . . ?" muttered Wally.

"It just happened Friday. I mean, that's when I found out. It was another reason why my parents didn't want me to go to Keystone City with you. They wanted to talk to me about it. I haven't told the other guys yet. I wanted you to know first."

Chan paused as Wally thought to himself that this was an interesting turnabout.

"I'm . . I mean my family, we're all moving. We're moving to Star City. I'm not sure exactly when but definitely before school starts in September. Maybe in a couple weeks. They told me I wouldn't be going to our school for 7th grade."

"You're . . moving?" Wally was crestfallen.

"Dude. I didn't want to. It's my dad . . his job. They want him to get another facility like the one that he runs outside Jump going down there in Star City. It's some kind of promotion, too. Beaucoup de benjamins."

Wally rolled over on the bed and slumped limply.

"There's no question, this is happening?"

"No question."

Neither boy said anything for most of a minute. Wally was crushed. You could say you would call and skype and do whatever else you wanted but it wasn't the same, not even close and you might as well drop it if one of you was in Jump and the other was in Star City.

"No question?"

Chan sighed. "No question. My dad already picked out a new house. That's where he went last weekend."

"I thought your mom decided everything in your house?"

"All the day to day stuff. My dad makes all the big calls. You want to see it? We've got all these pictures and a video of it. It's really cool. I-"

"No thanks," Wally mumbled as he got slowly to his feet.

"I-I wasn't lording it over on you or anything. I didn't mean anything like that. You know I wouldn't-"

Wally cut Chan off with a wave. "I know. I just . . ." He stepped over to Chan and gave him a quick hug.

"Man, that just . . that just completely sucks."

"I didn't want it, Wally. But it's a done deal. I love it here in Jump, with you and the rest of the guys. But it's decided."

Wally nodded. He shuffled his way down the stairs and out of Chan's house, grabbing an apple off the counter as he went. He shuffled down the street suddenly feeling like he not only didn't have any impossible reservoir of energy from another dimension. He barely had the energy to shuffle past Jeff's house and then down through the woods and across the railroad tracks to his house. One minute he thought he might get to share his secret with Chan. The next, his best friend was moving.

"Fuck!" he shouted after running it through his head some more. "Fuck!"

He glanced around quickly and, seeing no one watching him, buzzsawed through his apple in two seconds before tossing the core into the woods.

Dammit! If only he'd gone to Keystone City like he was supposed to! He might be a Flash now, too, struck by the same lightning, drenched by the same acids. We could still be pals. Running between Jump and Star City is nothing for Flashes. Dammit.

Finally, he got to his house and stepped inside. His mother was there as well as his sister and two of her stupid friends. Ugh. Once inside the door, he made a beeline for his room, not wanting to talk to anyone after Chan's news. But before he got there his sister was all suspiciously perky, shouting from the living room asking him what he'd eaten that day.

He sighed. Her and her diets. 10 years old and obsessed about weight. It was so dumb. Just exercise a bit more he would tell her. She would get all upset. Somehow, that was insulting her. She wanted to talk about her perceived problem non-stop but then if you tried to help her about it, she got upset.

Wally told her about the two lunches he'd eaten at school and then the three rice crispy squares at Freddie Simmons's house, though he didn't mention Freddie's name for not wanting to have to deal with their stupid remarks about being at the house of a boy who took ballet. And he mentioned the apple from Chan's house.

He could see his sister writing it all down. He shook his head. So dumb.

His mother had made some sort of casserole, some stuff with noodles and meat in a sort of gravy sauce. To his great disappointment, he saw that his sister's friends were going to have dinner with them. Less food for him.

He piled his plate higher than his mother, sister or her friends and ate as slowly as he could but it was still much faster than any of them. They all glared at him when he reached for seconds.

"What? I'm hungry," he protested. His mother launched into her usual 'eating us out of house and home' spiel. His sister seemed to enjoy that more than her food. She mumbled something to her friends about seeing how other people will like being put on a diet. He didn't pay any attention. He finished his plate, got up from the table and grabbed a fistful of Wheat Thins, nearly half the box on the counter and retreated to his room, his sister's snickering fading behind him.

He read the last chapter of his english book over three times in a few minutes. Pruneface was going to give them a quiz on it the next to last day of school. God. Every other class was just winding down but she was going to give another quiz.

Well, I've got a secret weapon, he smiled and read the forty pages another time in just a few seconds. It's good to be a Flash.

He read a detective novel and then an Elmore Leonard book before drifting back into the kitchen and taking the rest of the Wheat Thins and after a long survey of the contents of the fridge, a container of ice cream. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw his sister watching him as he made his way back to his room.

"What a pig you are!" she snickered to the delighted laughter of her friends. He only shrugged.

It wasn't like he could do anything about it. He was hungry. Although it was starting to worry him just how hungry he was. This almost didn't make sense. Flash had told him that his super speed wasn't powered by the food he ate. It was from speedforce. It was from an interdimensional energy transfer. Fine. But . . then why was he so hungry almost all the time?

He shuffled past his sister on the way to the bathroom. As he went by she muttered out loud, ". . and a box of wheat thins and a quart of ice cream." He could faintly hear her saying something else about diets to her friends, through the bathroom door, as he took a long, satisfying piss, but he just couldn't care too much about her diet fixation. Like his mother and father, she was not nearly as skinny as he was. She wasn't fat but definitely had a stockier frame than he did, even before the lightning. And she'd already enlisted his mother in her diet crusade against him once to no avail. The week before he got his super speed. he'd wolfed down a whole box of Nilla Wafers in an evening and his mother had dragged him to the bathroom and made him stand on the scale. What was worse, she made him strip down to his underwear to get his correct weight. His sister had guffawed at that. It wasn't even clear what they expected or what they wanted to do after they weighed him. 99 pounds. That's what he weighed. But was that good or bad? His mother and sister didn't seem to know either. What terrible science! They run an experiment without having a clue what to do with the results. But even just glancing at him in his underwear through the inch that he let the bathroom door be opened, they could see that he was anything but fat. So, the issue dropped.

But now his appetite was really out of control. That's what they said. Wally wouldn't have said so to them but he partly agreed. He was supposed to be a hero now. Heroes were masters of self-discipline, weren't they? But he could barely resist for ten seconds before wolfing down crackers or ice cream. If a villain ever thought to bring a desert cart to a fight, he'd be a goner!

Just before going to bed, he was hungry again. His stomach rumbled. He wanted to resist and make a show of will power if only to himself. But he caved in a minute later and started looking around for something to eat. There was nothing good. He couldn't finish off the breakfast cereal. His mom and sister would notice that the next morning. He settle for a bottle of olives that had never tempted him in the least. He gulped them down in just a couple seconds and immediately felt sort of ashamed that he was now resorting to inhaling foods he didn't even like.

He went back to his room and soon felt overwhelmed by boredom. But, there was something he could do about it. He turned off the light in his room and arranged pillows under the covers to look like him. Then, he pulled off his civilian clothes and triggered the release of his uniform from his ring.

A second later he was speeding down the streets of Jump City. Flash had said that a hero needed to know his city inside and out, upside down and backwards. If you heard on a police radio that there was a robbery at Kirkland and Fremont, you had to know where that was. Kid Flash really only knew well the parts of Jump City within a mile of his house.

Anyone on the streets of Jump City from 10 to 11 p.m. that night would have seen a yellow and red blur zooming down this street then that one, back onto this one then turning onto another one. The pattern of the blur's appearances would have seemed totally random. That was because Kid Flash was just randomly speeding around the streets of Jump City, getting to know them, filling in the many gaps in his knowledge of the city.

Another thing that Kid Flash noticed was the patrolling patterns of the Jump City Police Department. There always seemed to be a patrol car in the neighborhood with all the mansions in the north side of the city. Other areas of the city had fewer and sometimes very little police presence. But the richest neighborhoods always had patrol cars moving slowly, nearly idling through them. He made a note himself about this and, with no crimes to fight at that moment, went back home after an hour.

The next day, he went to school as usual. Chan told the other guys and they all reacted with nearly as much disappointment as he had. Of course, Stevie made Chan shown him the video and pictures of his new house in Star City and immediately started comparing it to his own. Wally couldn't get interested in exactly what Chan and his family's new house was going to look like. What did it really matter whether his best friend was gone and in one specific type of house or another? He was gone. Or he was going to be. It sucked no matter what the stupid house he just haaaaaad to move to looked like.

He found that the whole thing was dragging down his mood. Even acing Pruneface's english quiz because he had read the 40 page chapter 15 times didn't get him out of it. Even having had a day's more time than Aaron, Jeff and Stevie to process it hadn't much helped. They liked Chan but he wasn't their best friend like he was his. Chan had been the first kid in Jump City who'd really talked to him after his family had moved to Jump from Blue Valley. Other kids had jumped all over him for his orange hair and being poor and called him a nerd. Chan was the first kid who openly talked to him. And he and Chan got along great. They were definitely better friends than Aaron and Stevie and Jeff. No question. Those three complained about how he and Chan always agreed with each other whenever the group was debating any decision. He and Chan thought the same way about almost everything. They didn't have to explain things all the way through with each other. Just a word or two in the right direction would do. Each knew what the other meant. He could be so relaxed with Chan.

And now he was leaving. Damn.

After school, Wally agonized a few moments but just said 'bye' to Chan and gave him a quick hug about the shoulders. Aaron, Stevie and Jeff were going to go over to Chan's house. But Wally couldn't make himself join in. As he walked away, he got teary eyed. He would see Chan at school the next day and maybe a few times after that before he moved but it almost felt like this was their goodbye. It seemed almost girlish to be so worked up over it but then Wally said 'too fucking bad' to himself. This was Chan!

He didn't remember any of his walk home. If he'd run into any jerk 8th graders he wouldn't have known until they pushed him to the ground. He just suddenly found that his disconsolate shuffling had led him to the front door of his family's crappy little house. He made a beeline for the kitchen. Along with being depressed, he was hungry. His sister wasn't home yet. But there was nothing good ready to eat. Then he had an idea. There was butter in the fridge and sugar and flour in the cupboard. He had seen his mother make sugar cookies. It didn't take much else, did it?

He found a book of recipes and saw that it didn't. Butter to sugar to flour in proportions of 1 part to 2 parts to 2.5 parts. A little baking powder, an egg. He literally threw all the ingredients in a big mixing bowl at once, all of them in the air at the same time. It made an unappetizing heap. But, after a quick glance over his shoulder, he applied a little super speed mixing and 10,000 rpm later, there was a smooth cookie batter.

He turned on the stove, and a minute later had cookies baking in the oven. To his chagrin, his sister arrived home, with her usual hyena chorus of two friends just as he was removing them from the oven. They saw him scarfing down the cookies. He noticed his sister, again, writing something as she watched him eat, shaking her head.

He realized now that she was writing down what he was eating, that she was writing in her calorie counter book what he was eating. Sitting in his room he tried to puzzle out where that would go and decided it didn't matter. So what if she could pronounce that he ate a lot of calories? He was in impossibly good condition. He decided not to worry about his stupid sister's machinations.

His thoughts went back to Chan. At dinner, his Mom had made that same noodles and some meat in gravy casserole and he, again, ate as much as the other four people at the table. He mentioned, between bites, that his friend Chan was moving, that his family was moving down to Star City. He thought it was obvious that this was a very big deal for him. It made no impression on his mother or sister or the hyena chorus. He thought, bitterly, of how they complained when he didn't go all weepy along with them at some stupid thing they had obsessed about, some celebrity thing or some television show thing. God! And, here was his best friend, his true best friend moving away and they couldn't have cared less. There was not a word of consoling.

His feelings of guilt about not telling his family that he was now Kid Flash fluctuated. You're supposed to have unbreakable bonds to your family. They care for you and you for them through thick and thin. At that moment he felt so . . separate. He felt like there was no way he'd ever tell them that he was Kid Flash.

He went to his room but grabbed one of the bananas his mother had brought home from off the counter to take with him. He read a book about police procedures that Uncle Barry had recommended and then ate the banana. He threw away the peel in the kitchen and grabbed another banana along with a fistful of Nilla Wafers and a Snapple iced tea.

"Mom!" he heard his sister crying out as he was reaching his room. "He's eating even more!"

Wally rolled his eyes. He wanted to get away from her right now. He wanted to pull on his Kid Flash suit and go patrolling his city. He didn't have to sit there. There was something else he could do. But he felt like they were watching him, like he was under surveillance or something. Maybe later. He went to the bathroom walking right past his sister and her friends watching tv without a word. On the way back, after peeing then washing his hands, he got another fistful of Nilla Wafers and a glass of milk.

"Mom! He's eating even more . . again!"

This time, his mother came down the stairs. He could hear her coming. He just had time to chew and swallow 20 Nilla Wafers then gulp down his milk after them.

"Wallace Rudolph West!"

His sister and the hyena chorus loved that. Rudolph! He grimaced.

"You come here right this minute!"

Wally sighed and emerged from his room shuffling to where his mother stood at the junction between the worn out living room carpet and the cracked kitchen linoleum tile. He didn't ask 'what is it?' but it was clearly implied by his exasperated expression. His sister and her two friends approached from the opposite direction with anticipatory grins.

"Don't give me attitude, young man! You're eating us out of house and home and it's got to stop."

"I'm hungry." he protested.

"Even after nine thousand eight hundred calories?!" laughed his sister and the hyena chorus joined in.

"What?!" his mother was apoplectic.

His sister nodded exaggeratedly. "Nine thousand eight hundred calories in the last 24 hours."

Wally rolled his eyes. Was that a lot? Even if it was, so what? He was hungry. But his sister then launched into a recitation of everything he'd eaten in the last day. He now wished he'd never told her anything. His mother's eyes got wider and wider listening to all of it.

". . and before that, an apple and before that, three like rice crispy squares."

His mother shook her head angrily as the hyena chorus literally fell down laughing. "Oh my god! How is that even possible?!"

Wally stood there trying to think of what to say. He couldn't tell them that he was Kid Flash now and somehow his appetite had gone crazy as part of it. What could he say?

"I'm hungry," he protested with a shrug.

"That's not good enough, mister. Because it looks like your eating problem-"

"My eating problem?"

"-your eating problem is starting to-to be a problem in other ways. I suppose you hoped to hide this from us," she said and nodded to his sister.

Suddenly, over his mother's shoulder, his sister was holding up one of his old pairs of pants, one of the pairs of pants that he'd burst out the rear seam because of his new, speedsterized glutes.

His mother looked at him like he should give an explanation but he there was nothing he could say. His sister and the hyena chorus filled the void with a sing-song chant.

"Wally's got a big butt!"

"Wally's got a big butt!"

"Wally's got a big butt!"

He looked to his mother. Do I have to put up with this?

"Wally's got a big butt!"

"Wally's got a big butt!"

"Look, I'll concede that for the width of my pelvis I'm incredibly-"

"Wally's got a big butt!"

"Wally's got a big butt!"

Wally started to walk away to his room in disgust but his mother grabbed his wrist and started pulling him in the opposite direction. At first he was perplexed but as they approached the bathroom, he knew what this was about. "Aw, come on, Mom!" he protested while his sister and the hyenas made jokes about 'Wally Klump'.

"Get in there and strip down to your underwear then move the scale next to the door and open it enough that we can see it."

He stepped inside and closed the door wondering, frantically, how to get out of this. But he couldn't come up with anything. So, a minute later he pulled the door open just an inch, crouching on the scale in just his boxers and t-shirt with his knees to his chest and his arms around his shins so that they couldn't see his incredible abs or even his super speedster calves.

But they could see the display on the scale. 109 pounds.

His mother sputtered angrily, repeating it over and over again. "A hundred nine pounds?! A hundred nine pounds?!"

At the same time, his sister and friends were falling down on the floor again, laughing. From behind the closed bathroom door he could hear his sister gleefully speculating while he got dressed.

"Oh my god. You gained 10 pounds in a week! Ten pounds! You're gonna be a big fat fatty like Billy Holska. He was a skinny nerd, too and now look at him! You're gonna be a big fat fatty, Wally. Enjoy being able to see your feet while you still can! Ahahahahaha!"

Wally groaned. Billy Holska was a fat 8th grader, the sort of boy whose clothes always looked like they were about to explode, whose shirts somehow never seemed to cover his pathetically bad gut. He was skinny once?!

He couldn't tell them that he'd gained ten pounds in ten seconds last Friday. Uncle Barry had weighed him and informed him that he now weighed 109 pounds. Wally told him that he had been weighed just a few days before that and had weighed 99 pounds. Uncle Barry launched into one of his three minute science monlogues about how the speedforce had transmuted the super powered acids into carbon based organic molecules making up extra muscle. But he couldn't tell them any of it.

His sister was ecstatic about the whole thing, now she said she understood why he was wearing ridiculous grunge clothes. It was to hide getting fat. She speculated that if his butt was where Wally was 'blimping out' first that he'd become a pear shaped big fat fatty. At the rate of 10 pounds a week, he'd gain . . 480 pounds in a year, she said. Wally rolled his eyes as one of her friends corrected her that it meant he'd gain 500 pounds even. Wally sighed.

They took up their chant again.

"Wally's got a big butt!"

"Wally's got a big butt!"

"Wally's got a bit butt!"

"I-I don't have a-a big butt. I'm athletic shaped!" he protested to his mother.

His sister fell down on the couch in gasps of laughter. "You?! You never exercise at all. You sit around on your expanding butt reading books. Athletic shaped?! You're nerd shaped!"

"Wally's got a big butt!"

"Wally's got a big butt!"

"Look," Wally said forcefully to his mother after shaking his head at his sister and her friends. "I'm . . I'm in the middle of a growth spurt. I measured myself at five foot . . two this morning. That's-that's how I gained weight. It's because of my growth spurt. I bet in another week I'll weigh the same or barely more even eating like I do."

To his sister's disappointment, his mother essentially agreed to that deal. Wally got to shuffle back to his room. He flopped down on his bed chuckling at the irony that he was being accused of becoming fat.

Later that night, he went patrolling in Jump City again. Mostly he was learning all the streets. He mostly had 'em down from the night before but wanted to make sure. And he saw a fire in the distance, in the outskirts of the Jump City metro area. But by the time he got there there was no one to rescue. He approached the fire chief on the scene offering his help but after a long sidewise glance at the red haired boy in the skin tight suit, the chief said that everything was under control.

Kid Flash ran through the streets of Jump City a bit more then went home a little disappointed that he hadn'te seen any action. He was going to patrol alongside Flash the next day. He figured he was certain to see some action then.

Back home in his room, Wally pulled off his uniform and slid under the covers. Even though the whole eating issue had cooled down a bit he still wanted to get it under control. And another problem occurred to him, not intake but . . output.


	10. Freckletown

Wally's rampaging appetite had him worried. But another worry had now occurred to him. He was kicking himself for not noticing it sooner. Though, maybe it was harder to notice something not there than something that was. The fact is, it should have been there more than ever given the incredible quantities of food he was now eating. Wally realized, just before going to sleep the previous night that, since he'd become Kid Flash, since the lightning and chemicals and the speedforce, he'd gone number one about as much as expected. But he hadn't done number two.

It wasn't that he felt as though things were bottled up inside him. Thinking back he realized that since Friday afternoon he hadn't once felt as though he needed to . . to . . . take a crap. But this was impossible. He'd eaten huge quantities of food. He wasn't sure how many calories was a lot but his sister and her friends acted like 9800 calories in a day was almost impossible. They fixated on that stuff so much that it must be true.

He got up Tuesday morning thinking of this. He sat up and slid his feet over the side to the threadbare rug on the floor of his room. He pressed the heel of one hand against his abdomen halfway between his navel and his crotch. There wasn't any feeling of . . . well, he wasn't sure what it should be. Heavy? Dense? What? How would you feel if you had four days worth of food, four days of prodigious eating, maybe the equivalent of 12 days of eating for most people, somehow compressed in there? He wasn't sure. But he felt normal.

He stood up and then bounced back and forth from one foot to the other. Nope, no feeling of heaviness. He pulled on his bathrobe and made his way to the bathroom. He started the shower, slipped off the bathrobe and glanced at himself in the mirror. Not an ounce of fat, not a millimeter of bloated appearance. If anything, his abs looked impossibly tight.

He didn't feel at all like it was necessary but he sat down on the toilet. He always used to take a dump in the morning. He even tried to now, groaning with the effort but nothing resulted. Okay, that was ridiculous. He got up and confirmed the empty bowl and flushed though it wasn't necessary.

He then jumped into the shower.

After dressing, he ate two bowls of cereal trying to recall if Uncle Barry had said anything about this. He couldn't recall anything about either his crazy appetite or . . that. He would have mentioned it, wouldn't he? Wally couldn't decide. Uncle Barry and Aunt Iris had seen him eating like crazy. But Uncle Barry was eating a lot, too, wasn't he? Maybe the appetite thing was a natural Flash thing. Okay, fine but what about, glancing down, . . . that?

An idea occurred to him. Of course! He's seen the box in the bathroom medicine cabinet, the blue and white box. He'd never paid any attention to it but maybe it was exactly what he needed. After breakfast, he gathered his books and, while his sister and mother were leaving, slipped over to the bathroom. He only had a few seconds. He grabbed the box and shoved it into one of his pockets.

Once out of sight of his mother and sister, they went left out of the driveway while he walked to the right, he pulled the box open. He wasn't sure what to expect, pills or tablets or a powder or what. But it was little squares of chocolate. Cool! He tried one.

Not great but not terrible. It tasted like a sort of cheap chocolate. He ate another. And another. He'd really wanted to have a third bowl of cereal at breakfast, hell four, but with all the attention on his appetite, he only had two. This chocolate was okay. He chewed another little square then another till suddenly he saw that the package was empty. Uh oh.

He realized he hadn't read the directions and frantically flipped the box over and read it all as he crossed the railroad tracks to head up to his friends' houses. He stared at the box in shock.

"Each of those little chocolates was one dose?! I ate . . 24 doses of laxatives?!"

Twenty four!? He stopped and looked around wide eyed and one hand went, protectively, to the seat of his pants. I-I just ate 24 doses of Ex-Lax. Oh my god. I'm gonna crap my pants! This is gonna be embarassment-ageddon. Oh god.

He met up with the guys all waiting outside Stevie's house and walked with them the rest of the way to school. Well, his friends walked. Wally moved not quite in baby steps but in strides barely longer than that. He spent the walk to school and the first few classes intensely aware of his digestion and, walking or seated, with his legs tight against each other. At one point, he felt a bit of a rumble in his stomach but to his pleasant surprise, that was all that he experienced. Embarassment-ageddon never occurred.

What did occur was that, by 10:30 he was incredibly hungry again and by 11:30 he felt like he'd been on some kind of fasting diet. If he hadn't had to protect his new secret identity he would have super sped to the cafeteria. Instead, he walked alongside Chan and his pals and begged Chan for the money to buy a second lunch.

He sat there happily eating while Aaron, Stevie and Jeff talked with Chan about his new house. "Oh man, is that the view from your pool? West. Look at this. The dude can see, like, all of Star City from their new place up in the hills."

Wally nodded. He didn't want to make a scene or anything. But he didn't care about what Chan's new house was like. He ate as slowly as he could to stretch out the joy of food but he wasn't about to enjoy anything that was part of his best friend leaving.

And then one of the few bad things that could register as significant alongside possible embarassment-ageddon and his best friend moving away happened. It was the last day of school. He was hours away from vacation, from not seeing most of his classmates for months, from no new repercussions to his already lowly reputation. And then it happened, one of the worst things that can happen in school.

He got a demeaning nickname and it stuck.

He was walking from lunch to his next class, alongside Chan and the guys. He had one hand to his abs making one last check to see if anything felt odd in his gut. He was so preoccupied, he bumped into a 7th grader. It was a blond boy he'd never had any trouble with before, kind of a wiseass but not anyone who'd ever directed anything at him before. But the kid's books and papers all dumped to the floor as a result of the collision.

"Hey, watch where you're going, Freckletown!"

The entire hallway burst into laughter and kids all around him jumped on it, repeating it and laughing.

Freckletown?

Freckletown.

Ahahahaha! Freckletown!

Hey, Freckletown!

Hey, West, hey Freckletown!

Even Aaron, Jeff and Stevie joined in laughing at that. Only Chan held back.

He sighed, angrily and only ground his teeth together. You couldn't respond to something like that or all the kids would know how much it annoyed you. He thought maybe it wouldn't catch on. Fine, he had a pretty solid dusting of freckles. There was a boy with more in his class. He wasn't the-the freckle-est!

But, it spread like wildfire. While he, Chan, Aaron and Jeff were waiting for Stevie to clean out his locker, near one of the main buiding exits, a parade of kids went past including two big clusters of girls. They were all laughing and calling him "Freckletown!"

Great. Just great.

He said "Goodbye" to Chan again, at his house and continued on to his own. He was due to go patrolling alongside Flash. With the time zone difference between Jump City and Keystone City, it was only 2:45 when Wally got home but that meant it was 5:45 in where Uncle Barry was. He was supposed to meet him at his and Aunt Iris's home at 6 his time. So, he had 14 minutes and 50 seconds to kill.

He spent most of that time eating whatever he could find and thinking about what was happening inside him. Now he had two problems. The uncontrollable appetite was bad enough but what the hell was with the complete lack of number two. He pondered this through a series of annoyed sighs and came up with an idea. All that digested food couldn't still be inside him compressed into a ball or something because then he would weigh even more than 109 pounds. Flash had weighed him the evening of his getting his super power and he'd already weighed 109 pounds then. So, it wasn't that. But something else occurred to him.

He zipped over to the side wall of his room that he usually vibrated through. He leaned in close to the wall and sniffed. Hmmph. Nothing. He sniffed again, higher, about . . that high. Hmmph. Still nothing. Nothing at all.

Well, maybe it's all in the back wall of Uncle Barry and Aunt Iris's house, he reasoned. The pre-teen scientist had come up with a possible explanation. And he wasn't about to let go of it.

He did so much vibrating through walls, what if everything in him didn't always make it through with him? What if the-the stuff in his lower intestines didn't vibrate as well and ended up inside of the walls through which he'd vibrated?

When he saw it was 2:59:30, he left a note on the kitchen table saying that he was going over to Chan's house. He ran up the street, pulled off his regular clothes, pulled on his Kid Flash uniform and sped east. At exactly six o'clock, he vibrated through the back wall of Aunt Iris and Uncle Barry's house.

"Uncle Barry! I'm here, ready to patrol!"

"He's not here yet. He's due any minute," said Aunt Iris coming into the living room from the den only to find her red and yellow clad nephew sniffing at the wallpaper of the back wall. She watched him for a few seconds.

"Um, what the hell are you doing?"

He nearly jumped upright. "Nothing! Just doing a-a routine speedster check for . . excess vibrational energy."

"With your nose?"

Kid Flash shrugged. She let it drop.

A minute later, Uncle Barry pulled up in his car. He gave Aunt Iris a kiss, put some things away and a few minutes later red and red and yellow blurs were seen speeding through the streets of Keystone City.

It was a pretty uneventful patrol. No super villains showed up. There weren't even any civilian crooks to stop. There were some minor crimes committed, one case of shoplifting and another case of robbery at gunpoint. But the shoplifter was chased and tackled outside a small store and the robber trying to take the contents of the cash register of a bar, at gunpoint, was foiled by an off duty cop, in the bar, who threw some hot sauce in the crook's eyes and blinded him.

With J'onn J'onnz's help, Flash had installed a police scanner in one of Kid Flash's earwings. Flash already had one. They both heard the dispatcher describing these encounters over police airwaves but no other crimes at all. After two hours of running, with a couple breaks, Flash waved for Kid Flash to follow him back to the house. There, Aunt Iris had a big dinner waiting and Wally freely indulged. If his sister asked what he ate for dinner, he decided to tell her he had one rice cake at Chan's house.

During dinner, Uncle Barry asked if he'd been doing his "homework assignment" and learning the streets of Jump City. He nodded proudly and said he had. Uncle Barry reached over and gave him a sort of hug about the shoulders. Kid Flash beamed. He forgot what he wanted to ask him. Aunt Iris started talking about the investigation she was working on for a magazine and he and Uncle Barry listened to that through the rest of dinner. From there, he went into the den and Uncle Barry expounded on his theory of time travel. He said he believed that it would be possible for him and Kid Flash, if they set up a treadmill that could endure their speed and vibrations, it would be possible for them to time travel. Kid Flash listened with rapt attention even when Uncle Barry went on his nearly incomprehensible science rants.

This was so cool. Time travel!

It was only out of the corner of his eye that he later noticed it was already 1:30 a.m. Back in Jump City it was 10:30 p.m. It was an unofficial rule that he was supposed to be back from any place he went by 10 o'clock or he was supposed to call. He couldn't call from Aunt Iris's house. The number would show up as a Keystone City area code. How could he be in Keystone City? He was just a 12 year old boy.

After the briefest of sorry, I gotta goes and a hug from Aunt Iris he was through the back wall of their house and out on the interstates. It wasn't till he'd just sped across the Mississippi that he remembered that he wanted to ask Flash about appetite and . . and that. Damn.

He changed back to civilian clothes up the street and then skulked into the house. His mother and father both complained about him being late and not calling but they didn't do more than give him that initial scolding. He read till he fell asleep.

He woke up the next morning feeling, at first, the usual urgency to get out of bed and get ready for school till he remembered that school was over. He sighed and settled back into the nice warm sheets underneath the neighbor's purring cat, Empress.

Ahhh, summer vacation.

The first few weeks of vacation settled into a comfortable rhythm. He would get up and eat two bowls of cereal, or if his sister and parents weren't around, three or four. He would take the lawn mower and go to one of the 20 houses in the area the grass of which he mowed and do lawn work.

This was a business he had started that spring. One of the Wests' neighbors was an older couple. He saw the man and woman outside one day doing yard work and it seemed to be really hard for them. He offered to help and spent an hour mowing and then raking. They gave him fifteen dollars. To him it seemed like a great deal.

He went around to other neighbors. Some were tired of doing the yard work themselves. Others were paying landscaping companies a lot more than the fifteen or 20 dollars he wanted to do the job. Still others just loved that a kid these days was interested in doing the work. In short order, he had 10 customers. After some more canvassing of the neighborhood and good word of mouth from thr first group of customers, he got up to 20 customers total.

It wasn't easy work and Chan had helped him some of the time that spring. But it was great to have his own money that he didn't have to beg his parents for. And now that he had . . a little extra something that other boys doing yard work didn't have, it was a little easier. A glance here and there to see that no one was watching and he'd run the lawn mower across these rich people's big lawns faster than cars getting the checkered flag at Daytona. The same went for raking. A couple customers asked him to rake their leaves for them, too. They paid him extra. They thought they had just barely walked away from giving the West boy instructions and when they looked again, the work was all done. He was amazing. A few customers, out of environmentalist fixation, insisted that Wally mow their lawns using push mowers with blades, not with a gas powered mower. They would roll it out of the garage, The boy would start to use it, They would go back inside, look out a few minutes later and the work would be nearly done. That redheaded West boy was amazing.

The landscaping companies had other adjectives for him. Some skinny little red haired kid was taking their customers out in the Jump Ridge neighborhood. One day, a truck towing an open topped trailer with mowers, rakes and leaf blowers on it, veered to the side of the road and nearly hit him. But he didn't even move. Another truck slowed down and stopped beside him. A dirty faced young guy, much bigger than Wally threatened to kick his scrawny ass and pushed the passenger side door of the truck open as though he was about to jump out and do it. Wally stood his ground. He felt so confident in his physical abilities. He just couldn't always pretend to be a complete wimp.

"You don't want to fight me," he said to the guy more than twice his weight. "I'd kick your ass."

"What?!" the guy snorted and jumped out advancing on Wally but stopping short. "What, are you some kind of ninja boy or something?"

"Something like that," said Wally calmly, now clearly upsetting the guy by not being at all upset himself. "You'd never hit me."

"You a black belt?"

"Um, well, actually red, I guess. I'm not sure exactly how to answer."

"Well stop taking our customers you scrawny little fuck or you'll be in trouble," said the guy now closing the truck door.

"I don't think they're your property," he answered as the truck started away and the driver was telling the one who'd threatened to kick his ass to calm down.

Wally had stayed calm. He was extremely confident of his ability to defend himself now. But, in both his identities, he was chafing against the dismissive way he was being treated. Even Flash subtly did it.

He finally got Flash to explain what was going on inside him and Flash acted surprised that he was worked up about it. It was after his second time patrolling alongside Flash. This time they'd had a high speed chase to help out on. When the police dispatch call had played in the tiny speakers in their ear wings, the dispatcher had used the phrase "high speed chase" and he and Flash had looked at each other with smiles. High speed, huh?

They got back to the Uncle Barry and Aunt Iris's house and were digging into a couple of huge shrimp salads when Kid Flash asked between five different bites, "So, Uncle Barry . . . I . . . feel like . . . I . . . eat crazy . . . amounts of food now. Is that a speedster thing?"

Uncle Barry nodded and launched into one of his typical science monlogues about how he and Kid Flash had had their mesolimbic reward systems and hypothalmuses slightly altered by the speedforce. At the end of this rant, Wally wasn't quite as sure as he'd been after the nod.

"But I'm eating a lot more because of how I got super speed, right?"

Flash nodded again. Okay, one down. One to go. This was so serious, he even put his fork down with food right there in front of him.

"Okay, there's just one more thing you didn't tell me about that I've been trying to figure out."

Wally stopped, hoping Uncle Barry woudl realize what it was. His uncle looked at him blankly. What?

"After . . after I eat all this crazy amount of food, I-I never . . . you know. Number two."

"Oh, didn't I explain that to you?"

Wally reached over and gave his Uncle a half serious punch on the shoulder. "No you didn't explain it. You never mentioned it!"

"Well, it's pretty simple. You've got it figured out, haven't you?"

Wally shrugged bashfully. Uncle Barry thought everyone walking down the street should be able to build and atom bomb.

"Um, well, I figured that you and I do all this vibrating and that maybe the stuff in our guts doesn't all come through walls and things with us."

Aunt Iris jumped in. "So, you think that Uncle Barry's leaving all his poop in between the walls?"

Uncle Barry burst out laughing and Wally's face went bright red.

"Oh, Wally, of course not. You were serious?"

Still crimson faced Wally nodded. "Yeah."

"Oh, Wally. You're such a good scientist some times that I forget that you're still a 12 year old."

Wally sighed, not about to mention having eaten an entire box of Ex-Lax to fix the problem. "Okay, then what's going on? Because I have to know. I eat like a horse but it's been five days since I took a shit and I don't know why. So, yeah, please tell me."

Uncle Barry glanced at Aunt Iris who glanced back. They were surprised at the anger in his voice.

"Well, I'm sorry if I forgot to go over this Wally."

"Oh, you were probably too busy doing your molecular level analysis of my adenosine triphosphates or one of those other things you were obsessing over."

"You did kind of treat him like a science project rather than our nephew, Barry."

Uncle Barry gave a series of small nods. "I . . I suppose I did. I'm sorry, Wally."

"It's okay, Uncle Barry."  
"Well, now what do you think is really going on?"

Wally shrugged.

"What are the most enduring processes in nature, Wally?"

Wally didn't answer.

"The ones balanced and maintained by reciprocating forces," continued Uncle Barry with an implied 'of course'.

Wally waited.

"So, you understand that we gain energy, nearly pure energy that comes into our bodies and gives us super speed, speedforce."

Wally nodded.

"So, where's the reciprocity?" Pause. "That's where your solid waste excretions go. I'm sure if we worked out the mass energy balance, we'd find that Einstein's equation, E equals MC squared would hold."

"Wait, so your saying that all my-my . . poop goes to this other dimension where this speedforce comes from?"

"Exactly."

Wally looked befuddled. He stared down and pressed the heel of one hand against his lower abdomen.

"I . . I have a sort of black hole in my . . colon?"  
"Not a black hole, silly, an interdimensional portal. A black hole wouldn't be stable. And we're not sure where material goes that enters a black hole, though there is some pretty solid conjecture, particularly a paper by Sinclair in 1992 and a mongraphy by Lindstrom in 2003 about quasars susch as the one in the andromeda galaxy 400 light years from-"

Flash suddenly realized that both Wally and his wife were stating at him, not interested in hearing one of his science rants right now.

"Um, no. It's an interdimensional portal sending mass to that dimension as part of a reciprocating energy-mass cycle in which pure energy flows into our muscles."

"So . . I never have to take a crap again?"

"I haven't for more than two years now."

"Hmm. What about, um, . . . farting?"

Aunt Iris burst out laughing.

"I don't think you'll ever experience flatulence again, either. You might have a little gas in your stomach but you'll never be the one everybody else in the elevator's mad at."

Wally smiled. "I'm okay with that!"

He was more than okay. It was a huge load of his mind to have these uncertainties cleared up. With that, the first part of his summer settled into a consistent pattern of mowing lawns and patrolling in Keystone City alongside Flash. But the training wheels were about to come off.


	11. The Disappointments of Kid Flash

Mow lawns. Eat.

Talk to Aaron, Jeff and Stevie. Eat.

Read and eat. Go to Keystone City and patrol with Flash. Eat.

Read. Eat. Sleep.

This was, more or less, each day of Wally West's life from late June through July that year. He was sort of shocked at how . . routine his life was. He had never gotten that sense of superhero life from reading Spiderman and other comic books. Everything was a crisis in Peter Parker's life and then a fight to save the world, or at least the city, against, say, Doctor Octopus. And, usually, the crisis in his life and the fight to save the world, or city, would overlap. And no sooner was Doc Ock dispatched than Kingpin or Electro was there to start another fight.

But it wasn't like that at all.

He was shocked to find himself bored. Him, a superhero!

He had so much down time, so much dead time, tons of it. Even when he was doing something it mostly seemed like dead time now. He could have done all 15 of the lawns he was now mowing in just over an hour if he didn't have to pretend to not be what he was. He had to do the work much more slowly than he could. He had to eat more slowly. He had to do everything slow around his family and friends. He was stretching out everything he did in life and still he had tons of empty time. Tons! He was living two lives and he still had all this dead time. What the . . ?!

Flash had told him to run through the streets of Jump City until he had memorized all of them. And for a day or two, that's what he would do to kill time. But he could only do so much of that. Flash had told him to only run through Jump City and run to Keystone and patrol with him. That was all the super speeding he was supposed to do. Flash had made Kid Flash promise that he wouldn't do anything else.

But he was so bored. So. Bored.

So, he'd yawn or sigh, consumed with ennui, and decide to do something. He was a scientific boy. He was curious about the world. There were dozens and dozens of places he wanted to see. So . . why not? He could run across oceans now. It wasn't any big deal. So . . why not? At first he felt very guilty about it. He'd pull on his Kid Flash uniform and glance around furtively as if someone might be watching him or see him and know that he wasn't supposed to be there in Paris or Venice or London or Hong Kong or Singapore or Miami, as if it was a small neighborhood and someone would tell his parents, or in this case Flash. But then he realized, no one knew that he wasn't supposed to be there.

So, he got comfortable with satisfying his existing curiosity about these places.

Sometimes, he'd watch a documentary on TV about Machu Picchu in Peru or Chichen Itza in Mexico or Angkor Wat in Cambodia. And right away, or the next morning, he'd sprint there. It would only take him a minute at most now, to go anywhere on the planet no matter where it was. These places were fascinating and they were practically right there, as close to him as being two doors down the street was to most kids. How many kids would not sprint over to look at Chichen Itza if all they had to do was run two doors down the street?

So, he had ways of dealing with boredom. But, he didn't try to patrol or fight crime in these places. He was just your typical red and yellow unitard clad sightseer.

He tried to spend more of his oodles of spare time with Aaron, Jeff and Stevie but somehow it was harder for him to get along with those guys now, without Chan being there, than it had been with Chan around. Chan and his family had moved just a week after the end of school. It was so depressing. He would never have admitted it but his eyes got teary during that last hug of Chan. Chan knew. But the other guys didn't and he wasn't about to tell them. That seemed way too girlish, but it was true.

Now that Chan was gone, he thought maybe his friendship with the other guys would build, but it didn't. Maybe part of it was getting over Chan. He wasn't sure. It just didn't seem like that feeling transfered to the other guys even thought he wanted it to. He thought maybe it was the whole secret identity, just the feeling of it. that there was this thing, the most important thing in his life, that he couldn't share with them. He and Chan had shared everything. And now he couldn't share the most important thing in his life with Aaron, Jeff and Stevie. How do you get past that, he wondered.

Another problem was that it was summer and often, at any of his rich friends' houses, everyone would go swimming. He couldn't. He couldn't let his friends see the way he looked now. How would he explain that he was suddenly 5 inches taller and in better condition than seemed physically possible? Everyone would go swimming and Wally would mutter any excuse he could come up with and slip away.

He could feel his connection to his pals slipping away. But he didn't know what to do about it. He tried to think of some way to make things better with Aaron, Jeff and Stevie but as long as he was Kid Flash and couldn't tell them anything about his being Kid Flash, it seemed impossible.

And it wasn't just his civilian life that had become unsatisfying. Even patrolling with Flash had gotten boring. He quickly realized that, while he also had super speed and ran right alongside his mentor, Flash really didn't intend for him to do anything. He didn't send him up ahead or tell him to go to the left while Flash went to the right or have him hit some crook while Flash held him. He'd give a curt "I'll take care of this" or "This isn't for rookies, Kid Flash" or something like that. It was exasperating to Kid Flash. It was as though Flash was out on his normal patrol of Keystone City and he, Kid Flash, was supposed to just run alongside him but not do anything except watch him lest he get hurt.

At first he did this without complaint. Maybe it wasn't too ridiculous at first because he got to see how Flash interacted with the police, how he dealt with crooks, how you were supposed to fight crime with super speed.

Okay. Fine. But after a couple weeks, it annoyed him. But he kept with it, doing his part as a pure sidekick. He did what he was supposed to do. Only after a couple more weeks did he timidly put a question to Flash whether it might not be a better use of his abilities to not, you know, completely just shadow Flash in everything he did and always stand back for Flash to fight crooks? He knew by now how to do this.

To Kid Flash's irritation, Flash didn't seem to listen or maybe he failed to try to understand. He just sort of brushed off his words. Kid Flash sighed in frustration and wondered if this wasn't Aunt Iris's doing. Did she tell Flash that, okay, he could patrol with him but that he had to go ridiculously far out of his way to make sure Kid Flash didn't get hurt? He wondered.

But he kept with it several more days before, finally, he couldn't take it any more and when a call came into his right ear wing that the Keystone City police were after crooks fleeing the scene of a jewelry store robbery in one of the city suburbs, Kid Flash took off before Flash did. "Got it!" he shouted over his shoulder and sped off toward that suburb, listening to the tiny speaker in his earwing for updates about the crooks' whereabouts and altering the route by which he sped towards them to make the most direct interception. He reached the speeding Dodge Challenger a split second ahead of Flash and reached into the driver's side window and pressed the trunk release. While the car was still zooming along a boulevard at 80 mph, he removed the lug wrench from the trunk and, while the car was still going 80 miles per hour, removed all the lug nuts from the left rear wheel.

One crook pointed at what must have seemed a red and yellow blur back there and shouted, "Hey!" as Flash also arrived. Flash looked very mad but what could he do when Kid Flash tossed the lug wrench over the car's trunk toward the right rear wheel? Flash caught the wrench and then removed all the lug nuts on that tire, again, while the care was still going 80 miles per hour. A split second later, each speedster gave a slight pull to the wheel on their side and both wheels suddenly came off.

With a trail of sparks and grinding sounds of friction, the musclecar ground to a halt. With a blair of sirens, three police cruisers now stopped ahead of the crooks forming a barrier in that direction and another two behind them. Quickly, a cop produced a bullhorn and advised the crooks to throw their weapons out of the car and come out with their hands up.

One seemed about to. The other one, in the driver's seat, seemed to have the idea that he would fight it out in some Tarantino-esque spectacle or something. Kid Flash saw him reaching for a gun and simply rushed up to the driver's side door and took it from him, wrenched it out of his hands. He zipped over to the cop with the bullhorn and handed him the gun, muzzle down.

Flash went through all the usual post apprehension formalities with the cops as well as the news people. But there was a slight undertone, a different sound in his voice, something very unusual for Flash. He was mad. Kid Flash didn't care. He laughed out loud when the two crooks were being led away and the driver was berating the other one for setting off the alarm.

Once all that was done, Flash sped off and Kid Flash simply followed him. But Flash didn't wait to get home. He stopped in a half deserted strip mall parking lot and started berating him for "freelancing" and not listening to what he'd been told. But even Flash could see that Kid Flash didn't much care.

"You're not listening to me, Kid Flash!"

"I'm not gonna just ride in your sidecar. I appreciate the tutoring in using my speed, in dealing with the cops and with the crooks but this stuff with just running alongside you while you do everything is freaking nuts."

Flash gave a sigh. "I . . I promised your aunt I wouldn't let you be hurt."

Kid Flash nodded slightly. Knew it!

"I'm not exactly itching to be hurt, either. But I can do more than this. This . . the-the way things have been is . . insulting. I have super speed. Okay, I'm small compared to most crooks, but show me the one whose ass I can't kick."

It took several more minutes of discussion and negotiation. Flash tried to limit things as much as possible but Kid Flash was insistent that he be allowed to take a more active independent role when they patroled together. And he demanded the right to patrol solo in Jump City.

Flash said no.

Kid Flash shrugged. "How are you gonna stop me?"

Flash was taken aback.

"You'll have a hard time patrolling in Keystone City if you're spending all your time in Jump, standing over me in my bedroom keeping me in time out, making sure I don't put on my uniform and run off."

It took a couple more iterations of Flash saying no and Kid Flash casually responding that he'd just patrol anyway, whether Flash liked it or not before Flash finally relented. And, being Flash, everything had to be scientific and orderly and above board, not just haphazard.

So it was that, in early August, Kid Flash met Flash at the edge of Jump City and together they raced to Jump City Police Department headquarters. They spent a half hour in the huge brick building downtown as Flash dealt with one of their tech guys and the dispatchers. He'd called in advance, so they knew he was coming.

Kid Flash wanted to laugh. What a bunch of jock sniffers! The way they practically swooned over Flash and sucked up to him! They weren't nearly so obsequious toward him. It was hard to say exactly what was behind the looks they gave him. They were all gosh, oh boy, cheery when first introduced to him. But it became clear that they didn't have any interest in him at all, only in Flash. He shrugged. So what? He was the one who'd be responding to calls from JCPD, not Flash. Though, Flash had sort of answered for both of them as he finished setting up the high frequency signal that would send pulses to their rings.

"And when we send out a call, you'll respond?" one technician had asked. Flash had put his arm around Kid Flash's shoulders, clearly indicating them as a team even though it would almost always be Kid Flash.

"Yup."

He and Flash had run off while the excited tech guys and dispatchers were still talking amongst themselves. At the agreed upon time, 6 p.m. on the dot, the dispatchers sent out the signal.

"Ow." Kid Flash looked down at the ring on one finger as . . ZapZap . . ZapZap . . ZapZap he received pairs of electric shocks from his ring. That was the code Flash had decided on. Two zaps at a time for a police call. Three zaps was a call from Flash. Four would be a Justice League matter. "Does it have to be that strong?" asked Kid Flash thinking of the unwelcome prospect of getting four such zaps in rapid succession in the unlikely event of the Justice League calling him.

"Well, it's got to be enough to wake you up when you're asleep, Kid Flash. If a call comes in at 4 a.m. you won't be able to fight crime if you sleep through it, will you?"

"I guess not," Kid Flash conceded, staring at his ring still wondering if there was a way for it to be a little more gentle.

"Now, press your ear wing and check on your receptiion of JCPD dispatch."

Kid Flash nodded and pressed on his right ear wing. A casual conversation between a dispatcher in JCPD and one in one of the city's suburbs played in his ear.

"Good reception and volume?"

Kid Flash nodded. He and Flash sped back to JCPD headquarters. Flash told the tech and dispatch guys that everything worked fine and he and Kid Flash sped off from a bunch of smiles and waves.

All the next day, Kid Flash kept looking at his ring, his Flash ring with the lightning bolt symbol on it. He kept expecting it to go off at any moment. He imagined the twin zaps on his finger and then racing to JCPD headquarters and the cops being all frantic. "Save us, Kid Flash! It's Captain Cold!"

"Save us, Kid Flash! It's Slade!"

"Don't worry," he imagined himself calmly telling the cops, "I'm Kid Flash. I'll handle it."

He started trying to figure out how he would leave each situation and have it be inconspicuous. He was mowing the lawn of the Prendergasts, an old couple a quarter mile away from his house and tried to figure where he could leave his civilian clothes if he had to change on the fly. Then, he was over at Aaron's house and couldn't make himself follow the conversation among Aaron, Jeff and Stevie because he was more concerned with what excuse he would give to slip away and go into action as Kid Flash.

But, like the watched pot that never boils, the watched Flash ring never buzzes with a call from the Jump City Police Department. He fixated on it again the next morning to the point that he even started wondering if the ring wasn't working. Maybe it had picked up the JCPD's call that first time but wasn't picking up any calls since then. Maybe they needed his help but he was just shuffling around in his oversized civilian clothes, doing lawns and hanging out with his friends.

What if they're pissed off at me for not responding?! What if they start to doubt whether they should trust me?

Wally took a few deep breaths to calm himself. He wished he'd asked Flash how often the Keystone City Police called for his help. Even if Jump and Keystone were different, at least he'd have some idea what to expect.

He went back to his house and flopped down on his bed with an accusatory stare at his ring.

Stupid thing zaps much too hard anyway. Why should it be set to zap that hard during the hours when I'm going to be awake? All the freaking programming that goes into it, all the figuring that Flash and J'onn J'onnz did and they couldn't figure out how to do something with a clock set to Jump City time?

He gave another sigh and started reading. He'd gotten a book from the library with some information about a couple of experiments that he'd run using his Kessler-Zeiss chemistry set. They wouldn't come out quite right, the precipitates they formed weren't nearly as pure as they were supposed to be. And he couldn't figure out why. So, he lay there reading about these complex chemical chain reactions and typical problems that researchers encountered when running them. The book was intended for college student, not 12 year old boy scientists.

He got totally engrossed in it, so much so that, when his finger first stung, his immediate reaction was to just move his hand, thinking maybe he was pressing on top of one of the mattress springs. But then he realized what it was.

"Oh my god!" he whispered.

His ring was zapping his finger in pairs of zings at a time.

Zzzzt-Zzzzt . . . Zzzzt-Zzzzt . . . Zzzzt-Zzzzt!

In a fraction of a second he had his clothes off and had pulled on his Kid Flash uniform. In another fraction of a second he'd vibrated through the wall of his room and was on the streets of Jump City. He raced to JCPD headquarters then up the steps to the front door and up four flights of stairs to the desk at room 417 where he'd been told to go.

There, behind the desk, was Winston, the african american officer he and Flash had met two days before.

"Kid Flash reporting, sir!" he half shouted from right in front of the desk.

"Hi, um, Kid Flash." He glanced left and right. "So . . . is Flash due any second?"

Kid Flash shrugged. "No idea. But not likely."

"Oh, so you're the only one coming?"

Kid Flash nodded, unconcerned. "Where am I needed, sir?"

"Well, they're, uh, they're down at the SWAT room. We've got a . . situation they're gonna respond to."

Kid Flash sped off. He wasn't sure which room was the SWAT room. But it wasn't that big of a deal for a speedster. It was only one building. He went down one floor to three and searched the entire floor. There was nothing that seemed like a SWAT team's room. He zipped down to two and then to one and filling the hallways of both floors with red and yellow blurs.

Finally, he went down to the basement level and there, in a large room with dry wipe boards at the far end and filled with school style steel tube, one piece desks with chairs. He zipped past some big guys wearing all kinds of protective gear into the room, stopping at the front of it. He couldn't quite tell who was in charge so he just stopped there and announced, "Kid Flash, reporting for duty!"

Ongoing conversations in the room stopped. They all stared at him.

He looked around at them as they were all looking at him.

Their expressions weren't what he would have expected from the Keystone City Police Department. No joy. No relief. No . . . "we're saved!" There was a sort of look like someone might have on their face when they got something in the mail that they'd bought at Amazon and it turned out to only be half as much as they'd expected.

At least, that's what Kid Flash could see on the faces he could see. There were twenty four SWAT guys in the room or maybe it was just one guy twenty four times. Because they all looked alike. They were all over six feet tall, a bit heavier than they should be and almost every one had the same generic mustache. Kid Flash squinted a frown at the weirdness of it.

It was made worse by the fact that they all wore the same outfit, black, steel toed boots, two layers of pants, three layers of tops including dark body armor. On top of that, they were dark knee pads, elbow pads and dark visored riot helmets. Everything was dark. At their sides, they had, holstered, riot batons, guns and tear gas grenades.

And then, there was Kid Flash.

One of these things is not like the others.

Impossibly well conditioned, 12 years old, five foot four, just over 100 pounds and not wearing any padding but a bright red and yellow suit that fit him tighter than anything any of them had ever seen fit anyone.

"Where's Flash?" grumbled one of them to his left.

"Flash isn't answering this call. I am."

"Curtis told us Flash would be answering calls," muttered another to his right, apparently putting words to what many of them were thinking as grunts of "yeah" and "that's what I heard, too" filled the room.

"Flash might answer some calls but almost always, it'll be me," said Kid Flash.

There was a pause and a silence in the room that was unmistakeably disappointment. Then there was a shuffling about and fidgeting, a sort of precursor to taking action against this superhero bait and switch they seemed to feel had been pulled on them. We don't get Flash? We get this scrawny little kid?! What?!

"Well," on of them stepped forward, motioning for the others to calm down and then turning to Kid Flash. "Are you, uh, are you cleared to be doing this? I mean, you got, uh, parental signoff or whatever else is necessary?"

"I'm ready to go," answered Kid Flash.

He couldn't help but sense that the leader and all the others would have been just as happy if he'd had to run off to get signatures on a form or something, whatever these guys imagined that a yound superhero did.

"Okay, guys," said the apparent leader. "Let's get down to it. There's been a hostage taken at 25th and Figueroa and-"

But another mustached doofus SWAT guy wouldn't move on. He stepped toward the leader and pointed at Kid Flash. "Wait! How do we really know he's anything more than somebody's skinny ass kid in his sister's ballet outfit?"

Snickers from a third of the room.

"Uh, mister. I've got a super power. I'm a Flash."

"Well, then bring it on."

"Oh, it's been brought."

Pause.

"Oh, I get it. You want me to do a super speed trick for you." He scratched at his chin. "Hmm. Okay. Give me the home address of one of you guys and I'll get your mail."

The SWAT doofus scowled. "What'd that prove? 157 Sycamore, but-" he nearly spat toward Kid Flash. He'd barely finished saying his address before there was a slight whoosh in the room and Kid Flash was back in front of him with four envelopes. He tossed them one after another to the SWAT doofus. "Verizon bill . . . water bill . . . solicitation from the Salvation Army and . . uh . . something from the makers of cialis."

The SWAT doofus grunted and angrily clutched the four envelopes as the SWAT leader stepped forth again. He pointed to a map on the table. "Here's the situation. One Derek Morgan 5th place in the olympic trials as a powerlifter four years ago. Has anger management issues and is believed to have stolen a virtual arsenal of guns from the Jump City Fish and Game Club two nights ago. Last night, he knocked over a convenience store-"

"You should've called me," muttered Kid Flash.

"This guy's like six seven and three hundred pounds of muscle," said another SWAT guy.

Kid Flash looked right at that SWAT guy and shrugged. So what?

But his silent assertion of his superpoweredness didn't seem to have convinced many of them. He sighed.

"As I was saying," continued the leader loudly at first. "He knocked over a convenience store yesterday and today it's believed that he approached his ex-girlfriend in the street and when she wouldn't have anything to do with him he decided she would whether she liked it or not. Witnesses to his manhandling her called the police and when he saw multiple vehicles responding to the scene he's believed to have fled into the small building behind Jump City Bodega taking her hostage along with an old man who tried to stop him."

The SWAT leader pointed at the map and indicated three different buildings on the map where snipers would be positioned surrounding the small warehouse. "The rest of you will go with me and sargeant O'Reilly. We'll do the usual front and back code 416 till we get an opening."

Everyone started hustling out of the room toward three big black vans, like UPS delivery vans only with seats. Kid Flash had two burning questions. "Um, Captain?" he tugged on the leaders sleeve outside the room. "What am I supposed to do?"

"You, um, stay in reserve till uh . . just the right moment."

Kid Flash sighed. It was a lame ad lib. But he only nodded and sped off.

Before they even had any of the vans in gear he was standing next to a cop crouched behind a car door on the street facing the small building in question.

"That's Derek Morgan in there?"

The cop crouched behind the door nodded then took note of to whom he was talking, an impossibly well conditioned skinny boy in an impossibly tight red and yellow suit.

"Who . . who are you?"

"Kid Flash," he casually tossed over his shoulder to the cop while never taking his eyes off the building. "So, what's the situation?"

"The situation is that that huge motherfucker in there is hopped up on PCP and you could probably shoot him with his own gun and he'd barely notice it. But he's got a couple hostages and Manny at the bodega says there are twenty or thirty propane tanks in there so we're afraid to shoot at him but he feels free to shoot at us. "

Right on cue, there was a thunderous gutteral shout from the building. M-fing cops, something to that effect as far as Kid Flash could tell. Then, Bang-Bang-Bang! Bang-Bang-Bang! Semi-automatic rifle fire.

The cop crouched more tightly behind the car door and looked over his shoulder as the pre-teen speedster suddenly zipped away, just instantaneously disappeared from next to him. Then, a second later he was back with a handful of bullets. He poured them into the cops hand.

"Look like . . . point two two threes to me," he said with a nod and then a raised eyebrow. Right?

"Um, yeah . . . say, did you just catch all those?"

Kid Flash gave a yeah, no big deal nod.

Inside the building, Derek Morgan was mad. Only now he was even more angry. Where was that sound, that satisfying puncturing of cop car sheet metal from all his bullets? He looked over at that stupid old man and Suzy lying tied up on the floor. Just the sight of them made him even more made. He gave a bellow out a small hole he'd made in the flimsy wall of the building and then stuck the gun out and fired ten more rounds as fast as he could in a spray across all the police cruisers out there.

But . . what the fuck?! Again, no sound! What was going on here?! He turned back into the building. Had those little jerks at the Fish and Game club loaded a clip with blanks?! He vowed to kill them extra painfully.

Outside, Kid Flash zipped back beside the first cop hed encountered, crouched behind a car door. He poured another red gloved handful of bullets into his hand.

"Definitely point two two threes." he nodded as he poured.

Just as he finished, there was a screech of tires and the big black SWAT team vans pulled up at the scene. And looking up to the buildings he'd seen pointed out on the map in the SWAT room, Kid Flash saw snipers setting up. The SWAT team guys all piled out of their vans and took cover behind whatever was available. Some of them had some sorts of riot shields that they set up and crouched behind.

But the word went out to them about the hostages and the propane tanks stored all throughout the interior of that building. Kid Flash could see the SWAT guys getting impatient and frustrated as the minutes went by. The SWAT team leader was crouched behind the next car over and Kid Flash could hear the intermittent pleas from the lower ranked SWAT team guys to be allowed to do something. The pleas became particularly insistent after Derek Morgan again fired a series of rounds at the surrounding police vehicles.

"How 'bout you pussies send out your toughest guy and me and him fight it out to decide this!" he bellowed loud enough to be heard blocks away.

He fired off some more rounds. Again, Kid Flash zipped away and caught them all. He finished a blur of movement beside the SWAT team leader, into whose hands he poured the ten cartridges he'd caught in mid air.

The leader was arguing with another mustachioed SWAT guy who wanted to let the snipers try and take him out.

"Are we just gonna sit here and let that psycho take shots at us without firing back? If we can't let the long guns up on the roofs do their thing, then what about shooting a tear gas cannister and rushing him?"

"Did you not hear me when I told you he has an old man hostage, too? You know we can't shoot into an enclosed location with an innocent old man. His respiratory system might not take it."

The first SWAT guy reluctantly nodded.

"So, we're just gonna sit here?"

The leader was about to say yes when Kid Flash raised one red gloved hand. "Um . . Captain? Why don't we just take him up on his idea?"

The captain shook his head. This is what happened when some little kid tagged along. "I just told McCallister that we can't do that."

"No, not his idea," said Kid Flash pointing to the other SWAT guy apparently named McCallister. "I mean his," he said pointing toward the building.

"Huh?"

Inside the building Derek Morgan was glaring angrily at his semi-automatic rifle. It had been the same problem. No metallic pings. No thuds of bullets into steel. No crack of bullets into windshield glass and spider webbing of fractures. "What . . the . . fuck?!" he roared.

He had stepped one foot up on a low table and was about to bend the rifle barrel over his knee in a pure release of rage when he heard a funny sound combining a "whoosh" and something like a phone vibrating and suddenly there was an orange haired kid in a red and yellow suit standing next to him.

"There's nothing wrong with the gun," said the kid in the impossibly tight uniform.

He stared incredulously. "Where the fuck'd you come from?"

Kid Flash nodded over his shoulder. "Out there."

"And who the fuck are you, skinny ass?"

"Kid Flash. Fastest boy alive. I caught all your bullets those last 3 volleys you shot out there. You've really got an anger management issue."

Morgan let out a furious grunt and swung at the skinny kid but he moved out of the way easily leading to Morgan punching through some sheet rock on the inside wall of the building.

"Well . . that's no way to prove me wrong," added Kid Flash and he took a look around as he was backing out of the path of Morgan's telegraphed roundhous right. The interior of the place was pretty sparse. Aside from a few tables and chairs and some empty cardboard boxes the only things inside the darkened interior of the building were two dozen large propane tanks scattered haphazardly about and a young woman and old man gagged and bound with duct tape over in one corner.

"Anyway, you shouldn't be so mad. I mean, we're taking you up on your challenge," he said calmly standing his ground as the more than a foot taller and triple his weight former power lifter advanced toward him.

"What the fuck are you talking about, squirt?"

"Your challenge. Don't you remember? Send your toughest guy in here to fight me and we'll decide things. Well . . here I am!"

Morgan's expression went from befuddled to angry to convulsed with laughter. "You?! Ahahahahahahaha!"

"I know it's not fair but I'll kick your ass and there's really nothing you can do about it. Tell you what I'll do. You tell me how you want to lose this fight to me and I'll try to work it out so that it turns out like that. Is there a particular way you want me to kick your ass?"

Morgan's eyes narrowed and his nostrils flared. "Ain't no way I can lose to some skinny little douche bag weighs a buck nothing and wears some kinda fruit suit."

"Actually I weigh a buck nine. But I'm good looking, not butt ugly like you . . . your-your mom accidentally diapered your head when you were young . . . didn't she?"

This last remark did the trick and an already advancing and snorting with rage Morgan swung, right-left-right-left at the pre-teen speedster. But, to his immense frustration, the brightly clad kid was impossible to hit. He was right there in front of him but every time he swung at him the smirking kid moved just inches past the arc of the punch, snickering "Nope . . Not that time either . . missed again!". Morgan swung harder and faster, edging his way across to the back wall of the building with a score of attempts to smash the smirking kid but nothing connected.

He bent over now, hands on knees, breathing hard and Kid Flash zipped right up to a spot in front of him. "So . . do you want to be knocked out with punches or kicks? I mean, I want to be fair about this. I'm a superhero and you're just a big doofus who's gonna be fat in a few years and have trouble seeing his feet without the help of mirrors. And then there's the cost of all that diabetes medicine. I-"

Morgan lunged at him with another punch, hitting the wall with his fist on this one and from the lack of give, Kid Flash expected he'd hit a stud in the wall behind the cheap paneling. There were several cracking sounds like bones breaking in his hand.

"Whoa. You actually came close that time. Okay, not really but losers deserve encouragement, too."

Morgan had spun around now and whatever pain he felt in his broken hand he was immediately turning into anger at the pre-teen speedster. He grunted and snorted like a bull and then charged toward Kid Flash in the center of the room. Kid Flash shook his head at the ridiculousness of it. He could have dodged this even if he was only Wally West normal skinny kid.

Morgan's roaring, grunting charge ended in the sheet rock of the far wall. His head went through it but it didn't seem to much hurt him. He spun around more furious than ever. "Stand and fight you little stick man!"

"But, I am fighting," said Kid Flash from the middle of the room. "And I'm letting you take all these shots at me first. I could hardly be any nicer about the whole deal."

Morgan charged at him again. This time, Kid Flash stepped out of the way and tripped him as though they were acting out a Bugs Bunny cartoon. Morgan went flying and came down hard on the concrete slab floor. Kid Flash winced. That one seemed to have hurt him a bit. Morgan got up quickly but was a bit unsteady on his feet.

"For the last time! Fight, you little faggot!"

All Morgan saw was a yellow and red blur come toward him in too small of a fraction of a second for him to quite grasp. Then his head was snapping back over and over, again, too fast for him to quite grasp. Then he was falling to the floor unconscious.

Kid Flash stepped back out of the way as the ex power lifter hit the floor with a thud.

"Faggot? Really? I'm the one in middle school. That's all you can come up with?"

After a sigh, he zipped over to the young woman and the old man and untied them. "Stay here a second," he told them and went to another corner of the building where he found a white rag. He tied it on the end of a broomstick and waved it out a window. He heard chatter from the police outside indicating that they'd seen it. He threw the front door open and started dragging Morgan out into the parking area in front of the building. It was embarassingly difficult as the guy weighed 300 pounds and there wasn't much he could do with his speed to make a simple task of physical strength any easier. Finally, leaning forward as though into a hurricane force wind, he got the unconscious Morgan out the door and onto the pavement.

The hostages had already made it past him to the police barricade when the other SWAT guys came forward.

"So . . you beat him up?" the SWAT leader asked still not quite believing it.

"Uh . . yeah. I am a Flash," answered the offended speedster.

He went through all the usual post event formalities, making sure the civilians were okay, describing things for the police and briefly talking to the press. But while he was proud at having done his job, the single lasting impression he came away with was how different things were than they seemed to be for Flash. Just his size and age had everyone according him no respect, giving him no credit for what he could do with his super power. Huge doofus Derek Morgan insisted on swinging at him and charging at him even after trying to hit him multiple times and seeing that it just wasn't going to happen.

As he sped away from the scene back toward his house, Kid Flash wondered how long it would take for him to get the respect he was due.


	12. Grinding away at the new job

I want to thank the reviewers for their kind words. I readily acknowledge being a praise-titute thirsting for recognition. Aren't we all? It's only safe if we recognize it and keep it in check.

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On his way home from apprehending Morgan, Kid Flash stopped in front of the glass display case of a sporting goods store. What had caught his eye was a mannequin of a football player in pads, helmet and a full uniform right up front by the glass. He zipped to a stop right in front of the glass, his thoughts filled with irritation at the casual disrespect of the cops.

Jeez, I'm not that freaking small. Am I?

The floor of the display case was at the same level as the sidewalk outside and the light was just right so he could see his reflection with the football player mannequin behind it at the same time. He had hoped for confirmation of his point of view, almost a visual, "Yeah, you're right! You're not so small!".

But he had to admit that his waist was really small even for his height. And his arms . . damn, speedforce. His arms looked, well, he didn't want to pronounce this judgement on himself, but . . scrawny.

He sighed and tried to take the overall picture in scientifically and be totally honest with himself. Okay, that was the downside. But his shoulders looked good and his abs were incredible, especially with this clinging skin of a uniform. But he also noted, to his chagrin, that the red bulge of his equipment at his crotch was still shockingly conspicuous. He turned to the side and sighed. More outrageous conspicuousness in back. He was used to seeing himself in this suit after a month but he reluctantly came to the conclusion that if he tried to look at himself with fresh eyes he couldn't help but see his appearance as ridiculously revealing and though impressive for what condition he was obviously in, he probably didn't look particularly intimidating to an adult.

He went home and just lay low in his room thinking about this. The only time he emerged was to see a bit of the news to see the footage of Kid Flash taking down that Derek Morgan nutcake who'd barricaded himself in that building downtown. He liked to see news items about Kid Flash. It was sort of fascinating to him to see himself, this other version of himself, and how people reacted to that other version.

He wondered if Flash or Batman or Superman felt the same curious interest in watching one version of themselves while being the other. He wondered what kind of alter ego Batman and Superman might have. What were their secret identities? After much thought he felt sure that Batman must be a cop or a judge or some kind of guy who was part of the justice system. He was consumed with it. It made perfect sense. As for Superman, he thought for a while but couldn't come up with anything. Nothing. The guy didn't cover his face at all. How-how could he ever go out in public as a civilian? People would immediately see such an incredibly powerful guy with the same face and they'd go "Wait a minute . . !" Wouldn't they?

Before nodding off to sleep, his thoughts returned to his own predicament and what to do about the lack of respect he seemed to get from the Jump City Police Department. His final resolution was to just keep plugging away and prove to them what a good hero he was.

He got a chance the very next day with a fire call. He didn't know it was a fire call at first. All his calls from fire or police in the city went out through the JCPD and caused the same stinging double zap from his ring. He was only half done the Prendergasts lawn up the street from his house. He ducked into the stand of trees behind their yard and in a fraction of a second stripped off his clothes and donned his Kid Flash uniform. He hid his clothes under some brush and sped off to JCPD headquarters. There, Winston told him that it was a fire call in a warehouse near the docks in the north section of Jump City's waterfront.

He sped there at top speed and zoomed up to the Fire Chief beside a truck outside a six story warehouse with flames bursting out of half the windows and billowing smoke everywhere. The air was also full of the sounds of sirens and men yelling as well as the snap and static of the fire. The smoke had a strong chemical smell, almost antiseptic even a hundred feet from the building. "Kid Flash, sir!" he half shouted to be heard over the collective din.

The chief eyed him skeptically and half shouted back. "Can you go in that building?"

"Sure!"

"I was at a convention of sorts and met the chief from Keystone City. He said the Flash could go into buildings and get people out where none of his guys could. He said he could vibrate through a door without opening it. That's a big deal. See, when you open a door you give new oxygen to a fire. Sometimes it's almost like an explosion, the flames increase so fast. Can you do that same trick?"

Kid Flash nodded. "Sure. I can!"

"Look, I-I hesitate to ask a kid to risk his life but we think that building'll blow before we can do what it takes to get up to the top floor rooms where we think there're a couple kids! The guy who's sort of guard over the place brings his kids with him during the summer, two girls, six and eight! He was down in the basement when the whole thing started on the third floor, he thinks and he couldn't get back up there to save 'em! He tried! Can you?"

"Probably!"  
The chief nodded and added, "Try not to breath in any of this smoke. They've been storing old pieces of furniture for charities here. Lots of old polyurethane foam. Real bad stuff to breathe. And there're a shitload of propane tanks in this place that we think might go before too much longer. In fact, we gotta back off from where we are. We're too close to this powder keg. We didn't know what's in it when we set up here."

Kid Flash nodded and started toward the building. Off to the side next to a couple firemen he saw a guy in workman's clothes streaked with soot, intermittently crying and shouting for "Katy" and "Melissa".

He took a deep breath and sped into the building. The lower two floors weren't much on fire but they were filled with that sickly, antiseptic smelling smoke. He gave a couple short bursts of arm cyclones just to diminish the smoke and see where the hell he was going. There seemed to be one major stairwell at the corner of the building but it was filled with flaming debris between the second and third floors with more beams and stuff above looking like they might cave in at any moment.

He was stumped for a split second about how to get higher. He considered going outside and running up the side of the building like he'd done in Keystone but another idea occurred to him. He went back down to the second floor and piled furniture so that it made a series of steps, first a box spring, then two bookcases laying flat, then a table then a series of end tables piled on each other. A split second later he ran up this impromptu stairway, vibrated himself and went through the ceiling into the third floor.

This was no respite because this floor was nearly completely engulfed in flames. He had to furiously arm cyclone air ahead of himself to temporarily extinguish flames so that he wasn't running right through fire. He zipped to the stairway and though pieces of wall and ceiling alight with flames were dropping into it above the third floor, he could dodge these easily enough and zoomed to the top floor.

He stopped at the top of the stairs and momentarily forget the two girls' names before remembering.

"Katy! . . . Melissa!" he shouted as loud as he could then realized that doing so had made him breathe in some of the smoky air. He felt a bit lightheaded. Whoa.

He righted himself and then vibrated through one door after another. There were a series of large rooms off the hallway at the top of the stairs. "Katy! Melissa!" he shouted in each room. They were all partly ablaze, not like the third floor but getting there. The old warehouse building seemed to have terribly inefficient insulation between floors. You could see between gaps in some floor boards right into the room below. Flames were easily spreading through the antiquated structure.

"Katy! Melissa!" he shouted after vibrating through the door of the last room. But he hadn't seen anyone, no little girls, no one. His mind raced. He couldn't stay in there long. The smoke seemed really toxic. But where could they be? Was this a wild goose chase? It couldn't be the way their dad was going out of his mind down there. He replayed all his steps on this floor and then realized there had been two closed doors he hadn't tried. One seemed like it must be a closet. The other?

He sped out of the last room and vibrated through the door then down the hall. He vibrated through one door and found himself in a small space with some coats on hangers and tools strewn over the floor. Closet. He vibrated back out then sped down the hall to the other door. He vibrated inside. The space was not quite as small with the floor and lower half of the walls covered in tile. There were two stalls and a small sink. Two little girls were inside with the faucet running while both frantically splashed water on the flames encroaching on the walls around them. "Keep doing it!" the older one standing half cried exhorting the younger one sitting beside the basin.

"Katy? Melissa?"

The two girls slowed then stopped, stunned to suddenly find an older boy in a bright red and yellow suit somehow in the bathroom with them. It was too much for them to take in. They could only gawk.

"I'm Kid Flash. I'm a hero. I'm here to save you. Your-your father desperately wants you both to be saved."

They both jumped at him and hugged him, one at each side pleading for him to take them to their daddy.

"Okay, girls, we don't have time for that. This building isn't gonna be around too much longer."

With that he grabbed the older one in his right arm and the younger one in his left and lifted them up. He got the door knob with his left hand and bolted from the room as he opened it. The rush of air caused a huge expansion of the flames in the bathroom behind him. He zipped down the hall to the top of the stairway. The situation there had gotten much worse. The whole structure looked like it might let go. He sped down it in a serpentine path, going left down the first set of stairs to avoid falling pieces of ceiling then right to avoid wall collapsing in on the landing, then left and right some more till he reached the third floor. There, the flaming debris was impassable and he sped off to a flame engulfed but relatively smoke free room off the hallway.

Must not have been any foam or stuffing in this room, he figured. But, still, it was half engulfed in flames and hot. The younger girl was scared stiff. The older one looked up and asked in a tone of wonder. "How do you run so fast?"

He didnt have time to answer. He was weighing his options. Go through the flaming debris on the stairs? Try to do the run down the side of the building trick again but with a kid in both arms? Hmm.

And then another idea occurred to him. Wait, why not . . ?

"Okay, girls," he shouted to them over the flames advancing over the walls. "Close your eyes. You're going to feel something like a tingle or a very very slight itch all over and I'm going to jump down to the next floor. I'll shout okay and then you can open your eyes again. Now, close your eyes!"

Both girls closed their eyes hard. He set up a vibration through his body as powerfully as he could so that just their touching him set up the same vibration through them. He waited till he could see the flames on the walls right through them then let himself fall. They passed right through the floor into the room below. It was one of those old buildings with very high ceilings so it was more drop than he expected and he fell over, only catching himself against a slightly flame engulfed couch.

"Okay," he shouted as he stood up straight. But they couldn't see much, nor could he as the second floor was filled with smoke. He kept up a sort of hand only version of an arm cyclone with his left hand and cleared enough air to see in front of him as he ran. He got to the stairway just as the sixth, fifth, fourth and third floor landings all collapsed at once with a huge crash that sent flames and debris outward forcing him to back off from the now impossible exit route. Katy and Melissa both shrieked.

"It's okay, girls, we'll just jump again," he told them and zipped to another room. Flame was starting to really get going on the second floor now. Above them somewhere off toward the other end of the building, there was an explosion that was powerful enough to be heard booming over all the falling debris and flames licking away at the walls and floor. Some of the propane tanks going off. This was a little more urgency.

"You did great last time girls. Same thing this time. Close your eyes and you'll feel something like a tingle or a very slight itch all over. Ready?"

"Yes!"

"Yes!"

"Then, close your eyes!"

As he said that there was another, more powerful explosion closer above them. He vibrated himself as strongly as he could, waiting a split second to see both girls start to go blurry and become see through and then he let himself fall through the floor onto the first level.

"Okay!" he shouted and the girls opened their eyes. They were on the first floor now. Flames covered half the walls and random portions of the floor and furniture. The smoke was making him feel lightheaded again and he just wanted to find a way the hell out. The collapse of the stairways ruled out the main entrance. Oh hell, he thought. why not one more time.

"Okay, girls. We're almost out to your daddy. One more time. Close your eyes and you'll feel that same feeling. The next time I shout 'okay' you'll be with your daddy."

"Please!" pleaded the older girl.

"Close your eyes!"

Both girls complied vehemently.

Kid Flash started himself vibrating and picked a likely wall. He ran straight at it then passed right through the outside brick into a parking area just a couple feet down. He took big gulps of fresh air and zipped around to the other side of the building where the firemen had backed away another 50 feet and where the girls' distraught father was banging his fist on the side of a red fire engine and crying.

He stopped beside the man and shouted, "Okay!"

The girls were momentarily confused at where they were then simultaneously burst into joyous shouts of "Daddy!"

Their father heard their voices and turned around, similarly confused for a moment. Then, not questioning it, he took his two girls from Kid Flash hugging them tight to him and repeating their names over and over.

Kid Flash stepped aside, taking more gulps of clean air. The chief approached. He was starting to thank him when an explosion that dwarfed the two previous ones rocked the building and blew out windows on half the floors. Kid Flash just managed to throw up an arm cyclone burst of wind back at the explosion deflecting any of it away from where he, the chief, the girls and their father stood.

The chief slowly put his arm down from his last second attempt to block the debris hurtling his way that never got there thanks to Kid Flash and launched into effusive thank yous to the pre-teen speedster. So did the father and Katy, who he learned was the older sister, and Melissa.

He grinned and took it all in but it was funny. When he had been just Wally West, he'd idolized Flash and imagined how it would feel to be Flash. He focused on how it would feel to have everyone saluting you and thanking you and praising you. And he felt that now. It wasn't like he didn't want to be thanked. But there was a private part of it all that he'd never thought of that was a bigger part of his feelings now. He felt wonderful for having saved the girls, for having done such a good deed. It was the knowledge of what he'd done that was most important, not the number or quality of the thanks he got from people.

After letting himself be interviewed by one local news channel, he sped back to his neighborhood to the back of the Prendergasts' yard where he changed back into his civilian clothes. Mr. Prendergast was a bit upset. He didn't understand why a boy would just go off somewhere when he was mostly done a job. Wally didn't even try to give an explanation. He just worked as quickly as a normal boy could and finished mowing and dealing with the yard waste. All in all it was a pretty smooth transition back to his civilian self.

He saw a snippet of the news at Aaron's house later that night. He had to zip away from Aaron, Jeff and Stevie playing a video game down to the stairway from which he could see the giant living room tv that neither Aaron's mother nor father were actually watching as they read things. There he was in tighter than skin tight red and yellow high definition glory, the pride of saving the girls in an unavoidable slight smile as he responded to the superficial questions of the reporter on the scene. Like an echo of sound, he felt a renewed feeling of that same pride he'd felt.

The other impression that the news report left him with was surprise. He was surprised at how much of a jock he'd acted like. His body language, his posture, the way he stood and his apparent indifference to being seen on camera in his ridiculous uniform. He looked like a complete jock. He hadn't thought he was doing that. He thought he was being as natural as possible with the reporter.

He got more and more calls for help, despite the snickering attitude of disrespect, the JCPD didn't seem to be reluctant at all to call on him. The guys in the fire department seemed to give him a lot more credit but most of the calls he answered were from JCPD. And they came at all times and with completely random frequency.

He got a call around 8 the next evening and took down some guy who had mutliple warrants out for him who'd tried to run from the cops in a high speed chase.

A couple days passed before the next call after that, the deputy mayor's wife had been kidnapped. The kidnappers demanded that the ransom be put in a certain bag and dropped out of a plan flying a specific course at a very specific speed at the exact moment that they gave the signal. It was all calculated to try to make it impossible for cops on the ground to be there. The plane flew on a low diagonal across the Jump City metro area in a route that the grid of Jump City's streets didn't allow any car to follow.

But it was nothing for Kid Flash. The kidnappers hadn't taken him into account. He casually ran the city's streets in a zigzag path that let him stay right under the plane. When the signal was given and a bag dropped out of the plane to some empty lots below, Kid Flash watched a van drive up to that spot and then took off all the lug nuts on its tires. Two guys got out and picked up the bag then jumped back in the van. When they tried to move fast, the van immediately lost both rear wheels. The guys jumped out, perplexed at how this had happened. Kid Flash suddenly appeared in front of them. The both pulled guns on him but Kid Flash just snatched them right out of their hands and threw them off to the side. He suggested they go quietly but both tried to fight him. The pre-teen super speedster knocked them both out in a few seconds. The case ended up tragically as the deputy mayor's kidnapped wife was found dead. So, though he'd done his job brilliantly, no one at JCPD liked to much think about that particular case.

The next call he answered came late at night. He was asleep in his room with Empress, the neighbors' abyssinian cat asleep on top of him when was awakened by the pain on his finger.

Zap!Zap!

Zap!Zap!

Zap!Zap!

He blinked several times. What the?! He was inclined to go back to sleep.

Empress gave him a paw to the face.

"Hey, what's up, Empress?" he whispered at the cat and petted her back.

She gave a low meow.

He looked at her uncertainly.

Zap!Zap!

Zap!Zap!

Zap!Zap!

"Oh, shit, my ring."

He quickly and carefully lifted Empress off him then got out of bed and changed into his Kid Flash suit. Out of the corner of his eye he could see the clock on the table by his bed. 3:47.

"Damn!"

He took a deep breath and sped off to answer the call. The cops wanted help. They'd stopped a car in the Jumpton ghetto area and two of the passengers had shot at the cops in the police cruiser on the scene. One suspect had been apprehended. He had a bunch of warrants out on him. The other suspect had run and gotten away.

They gave Kid Flash a description of him and then he sped off to search the area. Five minutes later, after zipping down every single street in the area 25 times he saw something between some bushes and a small concrete building barely bigger than a closet, some kind of pumping station Kid Flash guessed.

He stopped a few feet away. "Excuse me? Mister . . Suspect? Would you like to-"

His next words were drowned out as the man stepped casually out from cover and started into an expletive filled condemnation of his partner. "Motherfucking Curtis! All he got to do is not get his cracker ass pulled over and what the fuck does he do?! He gets pulled over! Cocksucking motherfucking stupid ass Curtis! And now I got . . I got some superfuckinghero type on my ass. Damn! You that-that new one, aint' you?"

Kid Flash nodded. "I'm new."

"And you run all fast and shit, right?"

Kid Flash nodded. "All fast."

"So, there ain't no point in me running for it?"

Kid Flash shrugged. "Not unless you desperately need that tenth of a second of exercise you'd get before I tackle you."

The guy shook his head grumbling to himself then took a long look at Kid Flash. "Daayamm, boy, that suit's tight."

Kid Flash nodded. "Not my choice."

"Kinda like me getting stuck with cracker ass Curtis. Not my choice either."

That guy went quietly, but just like the cops who all seemed to have to have it individually proven to them that Kid Flash was seriously powerful, most all the crooks seemed to have to have it proven to them, too. They almost all had to go down fighting. Even when they'd been right there watching Kid Flash knock out one of their partners they almost all made him knock them out, too. It was nuts. One crook explained what might've been part of the motivation when, in response to Kid Flash suggesting that he come along quietly, snarled, "I can't go back behind the walls and have everybody know that I didn't even try to fight some skinny little pretty boy kid in his sister's ballet clothes!"

What could he do? Kid Flash just kept doing his job. He figured at some point it would be like enough other cops and crooks had burnt their hands on a bright orange stove burner. All the others would just accept that it was hot and they didn't have to touch it to prove it to themselves.

He kept answering calls. As summer ended and 7th grade started, calls eventually started to come in during the school day. When it first happened, he wanted to kick himself for not having worked out some kind of dodge in advance. But there he was in algebra class with the ring sending pairs of strong shocks into his finger.

Zap!Zap!

Zap!Zap!

Zap!Zap!

"Ow!"

He saw some of the kids in class turn to look at him and an idea occurred to him. He changed the vowel sound a little and clutched at his stomach.

"Oh . . oh . . . I don't feel so good."

He got up and started shuffling for the door, all he could do anyway in his oversized clothes. He muttered something to the teacher about going to the bathroom and once out in the hall started walking double time. He went to the nearest bathroom, changed into his Kid Flash suit and stashed his clothes over a piece of false ceiling. Not a great ad lib but okay. Then he sped off to JCPD headquarters.

He also got calls when he was with Aaron, Jeff and Stevie. Purely by chance, bad luck for Wally, he got a disproprtionate number of calls during the time that he was with his friends. He was trying to get somewhere in building up his friendships with them to take the place of his best friend Chan moving away. But these damn calls were killing any progress he was making, if anything driving him further apart from them. For no reason that they could see, Wally would suddenly jump up in the middle of playing a video game and say he had to go. Or he'd bail in the middle of them working as a group on some project in chemistry class where the others desperately wanted Wally to be the leader of the group.

And his excuses for suddenly ditching them were always lame. They didn't know what the hell to make of Wally now. It was bad enough the way he dressed with his retro-grunge hugely oversized clothes thing. They could deal with that. But the way he ditched them on a moment's notice started to seem insulting.

It was indicative of where his friendships with Aaron, Jeff and Stevie stood that they didn't protect him that day after the fire call and the police call came in the same night.

To make it even worse, Kid Flash had taken to a fairly regular schedule of patroling on his own. Because sometimes it would be a couple days between calls for help from JCPD or JCFD. Wally would pull on his Kid Flash suit and go patroling the City at least every other day. He'd zoom along every street and add extra trips through the Jumpton ghetto neighborhood as well as the theater district where he felt the cops patrolled less than they should.

One Tuesday night it had been a couple days since he'd gotten a call. So, he went out patrolling late at night. Then, not five minutes after he'd gone back home, a call came in from the fire department. He spent an hour helping to evacuate a housing project that was half on fire. Then, he was only back home again another few minutes before a call came in from JCPD. It was some kind of gang that did jewelry store robberies. They had a whole thing that they did where one car would leave the scene and stop next to three motorcycle riders who would all take off in different directions. Kid Flash caught all three motorcyle riders but none of them had the jewels. He and the cops but mostly he then had to search every lot, every property that the motorcycles had passed by to see if they'd thrown away a bag with all the jewels into one of the lots as it seemed they might be caught.

It took Kid Flash two full hours of speed searching to find a bag barely bigger than one for a shaving kit, in the weed choked corner of a church property.

When, at last he went home, Kid Flash was dead tired. He felt like he'd barely put his head on the pillow before the alarm went off and he had to get ready for school. He sleepwalked through his first couple classes, barely conscious. Then he had a study class and quickly fell asleep there. When the bell rang for the next class, he rose groggily but noticed right away that everyone was looking at him funny. He shuffled to his next class and caught a glimpse of his reflection in the glass of the classroom door. He went completely alert with alarm and anger. Someone or some ones had magic markered onto his face a handlebar mustache, a soul patch, sideburns and a pirate eye patch over his left eye. The class burst into laughter at his just recognizing these things.

Worse, still, when he shuffled into english class, Aaron, Jeff and Stevie were not exactly abstaining from laughing along with the rest of the class. Even the teacher made a joke about it. The only thing dulling his anger and his feelings of humiliation was thinking of how Uncle Barry would react if he could see him. "Oh, good," he imagined him saying, "the more you get humiliated the less people will ever be inclined to think of you as a hero."

Wally looked around the snickering classroom. Nope. The needle on the "recognition of the possibility of my being a hero" meter isn't moving. It's buried at zero. Hurray.


	13. Gaining Acceptance

As seventh grade wore on, Kid Flash kept patroling and kept answering calls. He felt like he had the respect of the guys in the Jump City Fire Department but that he was still fighting to get the respect of the guys on the police force.

At school, he was very attentive to any mention, whatsoever, of Kid Flash. He was happy to find that Flash's protege seemed to be immensely popular at his junior high. The boys were impressed with his super power even if they tended to snicker at the uniform he wore. The girls thought he was cute. They seemed to like that a boy had to wear a uniform like that. He overheard hushed whispers about Kid Flash and he saw girls share pictures of the young speedster accompanied by shrieks. But, paradoxically, Wally West's desirability was nearly non-existent among the girls at school. They pointedly excluded him from their parties. One girl even gave invites to Aaron, Jeff and Stevie but refused to let him come to her party.

But still he soldiered on. He got to see Aunt Iris at Thanksgiving and Christmas that year and that made a lot of things more bearable for weeks afterward. That included whichever stupid jerk at the Jump City Chronicle had captioned the picture of him at the ballet school.

Late one afternoon, out on patrol, he heard sirens in the distance and started to join a chase just as he heard it called in over the JCPD dispatch system. There was still a huge slug of after work commute traffic clogging the roads. The crook being chased got to an area of downtown Jump City where traffic was gridlocked with horns blaring everywhere and jumped out of his car. He got way ahead of the cops chasing him, turned one corner, ran down another street and turned another corner. There, he ducked into the marble columned doorway entrance of the Jump City School of Ballet and peeked around the edge of the doorway looking for cops.

"I don't think they see you," said Kid Flash suddenly beside him in the doorway.

"Ahh!" the guy half shouted and jumped.

"Why don't you just come along quietly?" Kid Flash suggested to the now frantic guy. Maybe he was frantic or maybe he was on some kind of drug. The guy's eyes didn't look quite right. He panicked and tried to run and tried to fight. He tried to run through the building to another alley behind it. Kid Flash stopped that and quickly knocked the guy out with a couple good punches in a hundredth of a second. He held him there in one of the bouncy hardwood floored ballet workout rooms waiting for the cops. Only a photographer for the Jump City Chronicle got there first. He took a picture of Kid Flash surrounded by ballet dancers with his hand on the crook's collar. In the paper next day the caption under the picture, which took up a quarter of the front page, read BALLET DANCER NABS CROOK.

When Kid Flash saw it, he just shook his head and rolled his eyes. It wasn't that he couldn't see some similarity in their attire. Hell, before he'd left the school he'd said to one of the boy ballet dancers in tights and everything who'd come running in response to the commotion, "You guys have it easy. Try wearing this," he'd said pointing to his own suit.

"What _is_ that?" asked the boy, seconded by a nearby ballerina.

"It's . . the stuff intense embarassment is made of," he muttered then sped off.

But there was worse to come a week later. He was on patrol. It'd been a couple days since he'd gotten a call. He sped through the Jumpton neighborhood up to Jump Hill then circled back down toward the center of the city. Way ahead of him, down a straight city street, several blocks up, he heard an alarm go off and saw a big guy, NBA power forward sized, take off down the street with people now running out of some sort of hipster cafe pointing at the guy.

Kid Flash turned on the speed. "Uh . . guy? You just rob that place?" he said jogging easily beside the guy who was sprinting as hard as he could.

The guy started to pull a gun. Kid Flash tackled him and after knocking him to the ground at the street corner added a half dozen hard punches in less than a second. The guy sort of crumpled. Kid Flash emptied all the bullets out of his gun onto the sidewalk with a series of metallic tinks and then jammed the gun back into the guy's jacket pocket.

After doing this, he noticed that a crowd had gathered around him where he held the huge crook by the collar. They gave him a round of applause and he bowed his head slightly as thank you. Kid Flash didn't think anything of it. Crowds were always gathering around him at the end of patrols or chases. It was nothing new. But he started to perceive that there was something odd about this crowd. Glancing around he saw a dark skinnned hispanic boy only a little older than him behind him to one side staring at him and biting his lower lip.

"Mmmm dat ass!" the boy joyously exclaimed.

Kid Flash froze. He held out his free arm toward the others on the opposite side of the circle trying to forestall their jumping on the boy for being gay.

"Oh . . he must mean that girl there," he said pointing to a skinny girl with long flowing blond hair with her back to the rest of the group as a way to rescue the boy. She was hardly Kid Flash's idea of a girl with a great booty. She barely had any but she was the only girl in the immediate vicinity.

And then she turned around and was revealed to be a he, a boy with delicate features wearing a shirt like a blouse over girl style skinny jeans.

Kid Flash gulped. "Come on guys . . leave him alone," he gestured to the boy who made the comment about his buns. But nobody in the circle of bystanders was saying or doing anything aggressive toward that boy. In fact, another boy also behind him over his other shoulder chortled a nasally, "Mmm, yes, dat ass!" in agreement and the entire circle of onlookers gave cheery laughs in agreement.

For a moment, Kid Flash was thrown. What the . . ?!

Then he glanced around frantically and saw a marquee advertising an older broadway musical to one side, a marquee advertising a performance of the Jump City Ballet and another advertising performances of the musical Rent. He saw all the chichi upscale clothing shops and the street names on a nearby street sign and then it dawned on him. He was in the theater district, "theater district" being the politically correct code phrase for the gay district of Jump City.

He glanced at the crowd around him. All men and boys of varying age and all smiling at him in an overly obvious way that he hoped to be able to avoid when he finally met Bat Girl or Wonder Girl.

"Dat ass? Ha! Dat package!" laughed another boy in front of him to one side in a voice that sounded like a sort of gay Austin Powers. Kid Flash couldn't refrain from glancing quickly down at the usual smuggling a mango into the country bulge at the front of his suit. He groaned quietly.

"No, definitely dat ass," countered an older man and to Kid Flash's mortification, the crowd around him now broke out into a surreal gay version of the old Lite beer great taste versus less filling argument with half the crowd shouting "Dat Ass!" and the other half responding "Dat package!"

"Dat ass!"

"Dat package!"

"Dat ass!"

"Dat-"

"Guys! Guys! Guys!" he interrupted shouting. "I'm . . I'm not very old. You're-you're not supposed to be treating a boy my age like this."

He wanted to take even more offense but he remembered how Flash had told him, in typically over intellectualized Flash style how not having any fat, especially not having a soft 'baby' face and having, how had Flash put it? Oh yeah, a reproductive organ a standard deviation in excess of . . Kid Flash had interrupted. A big one? Flash had sighed. Yes, a big one. People subconsciously take these as markers for physical maturity and age and will guess you to be a few years older than you are. Mostly this was good. If the cops knew he was 12 instead of the 14 or 15 they might've thought he was, they'd be even worse jerks toward him. But this was a different crowd.

They were a bit more subdued now, till the dark skinned hispanic boy pointed and objected softly, "But . . dat ass!"

"Look!" Kid Flash turned toward him. "I'm . . . ," he realized he couldn't say how old he is as part of protecting his secret identity.

"He's not legal is what he means to say. Right? You aren't, are you?" said a guy in his 30's off to one side.

"No. And . . thank you. At least, um . . I don't think I am. How old is legal?"

"Sixteen in this state!" answered a chorus of most of the bystanders.

Kid Flash shook his head at their all knowing this.

"Do you do something special for your glutes?" asked a middle aged man to one side as the crook was recovering slightly, groaning as he did so and inspiring Kid Flash to tighten his grip on his collar.

"What? No."

"You don't do, like, lunges with heavy dumbells?" asked a man from the other side.

"No! I'm-I'm just . . this is the way I am."

"Nobody's buns are like that naturally."

"Mine are!"

"How do you get that suit to be so tight?" asked another.

"Yeah," laughed someone else and chuckles broke out all around him.

Kid Flash sighed in exasperation. His face was nearly as red as the bottom half of his suit now. "Flash invented the suit. I don't know exactly what's in it."

"Oh, we can see exactly what's in it!" chuckled another and there were more laughs all around.

"Look, guys, this is all sort of . . complimentary but it's also kind of, I don't know, . . disrespectful to me."

"No it's not!" responded the dark skinned hispanic boy. "We completely respect dat ass!"

"Dat package!"

"Dat ass!"

"No-guys! Guys! Stop that! You've-you've gotta work with me here. I'm trying to be a good guy. I've seen where the cops patrol here in Jump City and where they don't. If you live in one of the mansions on Jump Hill in the north end of town you practically have to dodge police cruisers to get in and out of your driveway. But they underpatrol the Jumpton ghetto neighborhood and this area. And . . and that's not right. No one deserves more protection from crime than anyone else because of how much money they have or how they look or . . who they kiss or . . or for any reason. So, you gotta help me out. The same cops who don't patrol here look down on me because . . well, for whatever reason. They treat me condescendingly and act like they're professionals but I'm not, like I'm just some kid playing at this. So, just . . chill when the cops arrive, okay? I-I have to look professional. Allright?"

He looked around the circle of bystandars surrounding him and the captured crook on the street corner, visually extracting a promise. Everyone gave a nod, large or small and just as he was finishing looking around the circle, sirens wailed close and two police cruisers came skidding to a halt right in front of them.

When the cops got out of their cars and came through the crowd, no one spoke in the exaggerated nasally drawls they'd been speaking in just a few minutes ago. A couple bystanders conspicuously looked at their watches and noted that it had taken the cops almost 10 minutes to get there. They wondered aloud if anyone on Jump Hill ever has to wait 10 minutes to get response to a 911 call.

The cops, who'd gotten out of their cruisers with smirks and eye rolls, oh christ, the . . "theater" district, now looked sheepish and embarassed instead.

Kid Flash explained to them all the details of exactly how he'd captured the guy. The owner of the cafe that had been robbed stepped forward and told the police what had transpired. Two older men bystanders gave their names to the cops saying they'd witnessed the apprehension and that it was just like Kid Flash had said.

One sighed and nodded his head at Kid Flash as he finished his explanation. "Little mister by the book," he frowned.

"You have some kind of rule against fraternizing with civilians or something?" the other man asked the cops as they were stuffing the perp into the back seat of a cruiser. The cops looked at him quizzically. "Little Joe Friday here," he gestured to Kid Flash, "wouldn't even speak to us except to confirm details of the case. Just the facts, sir. Just the facts."

Kid Flash had a few more words with the cops and then they drove off to JCPD headquarters with the handcuffed perp in the back seat. Once they were down the street and out of sight, Kid Flash turned back toward the crowd with a smile. "Thanks guys. That was . . really cool."

"Thank _you_," responded a couple voices from the crowd.

Kid Flash waved with one red gloved hand, then crouched slightly, coiling for a sprint start, and sped off but not quickly

enough to miss hearing one last time, in an awed whisper. "Mmm dat ass!"

Many, perhaps even most of the residents of Jump City didn't realize it but from that time forward, Kid Flash was a favorite of the gay community. For a few years they were low key about it. After all, he wasn't legal. Most didn't even think he was on "their team". But by speaking, unsolicited, about the pattern of police neglect which they'd all suspected and how he tried to counter it, he won a lot of fans. The weekly free paper distributed in the theater district even had an issue a few months later with the entire cover devoted to a picture of Kid Flash with the caption, OUR HERO.

But the road to full acceptance by the Jump City Police Department wasn't as quickly traveled. Kid Flash answered calls all through seventh grade as professionally as he could. He was pretty sure, by the school year, that most of the officers in JCPD took him seriously. It can be hard to say with certainty when someone passes a tipping point in receiving respect but with Kid Flash and the Jump City Police Department it was almost certainly the Turk Kazmir incident.

Turk Kazmir was an officer in the JCPD for 10 years. He started in the force straight out of college. College boys were typically regarded as wusses by the guys out on the streets. The college boys all seemed to want to go straight from being handed their diploma to a cushy desk job as a lieutenant or a captain. College boys didn't want to actually get their hands dirty patroling on the street. College boys weren't willing to mix it up with perps. They resorted to using their firearms too quickly when a good forearm or fist could have resolved things way short of threatening deadly force.

That was most of the college guys in JCPD, but not Turk Kazmir. Turk stood six one and weighed 170 when he first joined the force. He wasn't the biggest cop but when it came to breaking up a barroom brawl, he was the first one through the door every time. When it came to running down a fleeing suspect in one of those chases where some wired up kid would run through traffic then go over two chain link fences and through a closed window, Turk was the best. He was not only the best on the force at dealing with them but Turk seemed to love the adrenaline high of these situations. He seemed to crave it. And at first it was all cool. Better than that, he was a budding legend, the young star of JCPD. But then there was the divorce. That was the first chink in the armor of Turk Kazmir JCPD star. Turk's wife initiated the process and there were dark rumors that Turk didn't stop punching once he went off duty. But there was nothing official and the legend was so strong that it made it over this obstacle.

Turk continued to make some amazing collars and his reputation in fights only grew. When, finally someone in a bar gave it to Turk just as well as he'd gotten it from him, using karate, Turk plunged into martial arts and became a black belt. A year or so later when a huge guy in a drug house wrestled him to a standstill and was only arrested because another officer put a gun in his face, Turk changed again. Weightlifting, and some whispered steroids, created a new 220 pound Turk. But not long after that, the complaints started. Maybe there had been complaints before but never anything on paper.

Turk had always fought willing combatants. But now there were complaints from battered and bruised suspects that they hadn't tried to resist at all, that officer Kazmir had made them fight. The first two times it was drug gang soldiers who'd complained. These were guys about whom the question wasn't innocent or guilty but 5 to 15 or 15 to life. The legend of Turk Kazmir kept rolling. Then there was the Bellamy case. Turk beat the hell out of a guy named Bob Bellamy who was a suspect in serial killings. He looked just like the composite drawing from witnesses. But the guy turned out to be completely innocent. And he sued Jump City and won millions.

It was only a matter of time after that. One more mistake and Turk was going to be bounced off the force. Despite explicit warnings, he couldn't help himself and he went MMA on another suspect. Turk was fired.

He didn't know what to do with himself. Policing was as perfect a job for him as there was. It mostly steered his adrenaline junkie ways into constructive activities. Nobody on the force was quite sure what Turk was doing for a year's time. He didn't have many real friends on the force. Then one day, suddenly, there he was, at JCPD's downtown headquarters. Turk looked mostly the same but even bigger. Maybe 230 muscled pounds now. At first, it seemed like he was just dropping in to say hello. He went all around the building. But his attitude was even more aggressive than before. On the tiniest of pretenses, he half challenged to fights three different cops with whom he'd had disagreements in the past. They all backed down. No one wanted to fight Turk Kazmir JCPD legend and hyper agressive black belt. It seemed like he was just about to leave, and a bunch of cops would get to heave sighs of relief, when suddenly he knocked out one cop at the drug lockup with a single punch then slammed the head of another into a wall leaving him on the floor groaning. He took a running step and kicked the door of the drug lockup off the frame.

Another couple officers heard the commotion and came running. They found Turk inside packing into a backpack 200 pounds of cocaine recently seized from a drug cartel courier. He threw the first officer who tried to stop him into a wall and even with the backpack laden with 200 pounds on his back, when the other officer tried to take him on with martial arts, he whupped him, too. From there, Turk stormed down one hallway as an alarm went over the building's public address system. A dozen officers gathered at both the front and rear entrances to the building. They braced for impact, frantically trying to agree on how to take him down. It didn't matter. Turk climbed down the side of the brick building. In the year off the force he'd done some rock climbing.

Wally West was in the basement of the Wests' house trying to figure out why experiment #792 of his Kessler-Zeiss chemistry set wouldn't quite work right when his ring signalled him. He was holding a test tube filled with light blue liquid up to the light to see if any white precipitate had formed on the bottom.

Zap!Zap!

Zap!Zap!

"Ow! Damn ring." He nearly dropped the test tube before returning it to the stand and running upstairs.

A quick glance after closing the door to the basement revealed only his sister and two of her friends.

"I'm gonna go write some computer code with the guys," he said to her and headed for the door. They snorted laughter behind him but, as expected, showed no more curiosity. Once outside he ran up the street, into some woods and a fraction of a second later was in his Kid Flash suit and sprinting for JCPD headquarters.

Once at Winston's desk, he got a 30 second synopsis of the life and career of one Turk Kazmir, much longer than Winston usually took to give him the lowdown on a situation.

He sped out the building looking for a white Chevy Malibu, the car one cop had glimpsed Kazmir getting into at the street corner. after him. He saw one on the interstate north of JCPD headquarters. Speeding up to it then running beside it he saw what he figured to be the backpack in question in the back seat and a guy fitting the description of Kazmir beside it. He was so intent on making that identification that he didn't notice till the guy was pulling the trigger that the guy in the passenger side front seat had a big 45 caliber pistol pointed at him.

Pow . . Pow . . Pow . . Pow!

"Hey! Don't do that! Someone could get hurt!"

The guy had sort of ugly face cast in a permanent scowl. He double scowled now because he thought he'd hit the colorful little freak with all four of those shots. But the little bastard just kept going. And his cheerful tone drove the guy crazy.

"I didn't sign up to fight no cape!" he shouted to the others. But then the kid in the red and yellow was gone. Or was he? Scowl face spun around on his seat looking for him. A second later Kazmir in the back seat shouted and pointed over by the left rear wheel. But then there was no sight of him there. Then the driver saw something in the side view mirror on the right side and pointed over there. Scowlface leaned out the window ready to shoot a few more rounds but then the kid was gone from there, too. And then, with a tremendous thud the whole car seemed to drop and all three of them hit their heads on the roof inside. The driver whipped the wheel over to take an exit he'd nearly passed but there was something wrong. The car had no push. The back wheels were dragging and throwing out sparks. Out one window they saw Kid Flash retrieving their back wheels and rolling them off to the shoulder.

The car made it to the bottom of the exit ramp and Turk and the others jumped out as sirens wailed louder, approaching from all directions. The other two tried to run back up the ramp. Afterward, one admitted that they intended to carjack another vehicle up on the interstate to try to escape.

They got halfway up the ramp before a blur of red and yellow stopped 10 feet from them. "You guys wanna come along quietly?"

"Fuck!" shouted one realizing their predicament.

"Fuckin' cape!" grunted the other pulling his gun from his waistband. Then, suddenly, Kid Flash was right there inches from him pulling the gun from his hand and throwing it aside. And just as he belatedly tried to wrestle for it, he was hit in the face an impossible number of times in a fraction of a second. He slumped to the concrete.

The first one held his hands up. "Not fightin'! Make sure you tell the cops that! I didn't fight! I didn't shoot at you!"

Kid Flash zipped away and back and then faster than he could take it all in, the guy found his hands cuffed behind his back and himself lowered into a seated position against a jersey barrier.

"Got it. You took the smart way out," said Kid Flash suddenly materializing out of a red and yellow blur in front of him and then turning into a blur again that headed down the ramp. A second later, the guy saw the blur circle back from below him to the top of the ramp three times. And when he looked up there, there were orange traffic barrels and cones blocking any more drivers from taking the ramp.

Down below, Kid Flash found a peculiar scene. Within a circle of police cruisers and officers was that Turk Kazmir dude, 230 pounds of loving a fight. And, predictably, he wouldn't surrender without one. Or without three so far. There was no way out for Kazmir. Any escape was physically blocked by police cruisers or police officers. There was literally not room to walk between them all in the circle they made around him on the pavement at the bottom of the ramp. In the middle of it was the camping backpack full of cocaine that Winston had mentioned to him. Turk Kazmir stood beside it shouting "Come on! If you guys are cops instead of me, you should be able to take me down!"

There two officers being dragged out of the 100 foot diameter circle. They'd apparently gone in to take on Kazmir and he'd kicked their asses. Bad.

Kid Flash zipped beside the police captain who seemed to be in charge of things. He was frantically talking to a subordinate. "What do you mean?! How could there be 30 of us here and not one guy has a taser?!"

Kazmir suddenly zeroed in on a cop right next to Kid Flash and advanced a couple steps toward him. "Lindstrom! You bastard! You testified against me at the hearing! Why don't you come out here like a man?!"

Kid Flash saw that Lindstrom's hand had gone to his service revolver at his hip. But even if one of them wanted to shoot Kazmir, they couldn't now. They were in a circle around him. There would be other cops behind him no matter who fired.

Kid Flash was about step forward to end this when another big cop did. This guy had a SWAT outfit on and he was taller and heavier than Kazmir. In about five chop socky seconds, Kazmir knocked him out with three sets of kick punch combinations. Emboldened, he roared at the whole circle of onlooking cops.

Kid Flash stepped forward, casually walking up to the much larger Kazmir.

"What?! You guys are afraid to face me so you're sending a little boy to do your dirty work! Go ahead," he snarled to Kid Flash. I can't be hurt by someone as scrawny as you."

"Um . . yeah. You can," said Kid Flash and in a fraction of a second he sped forward, punched Kazmir on the jaw three times then zipped back to where he was. Kazmir shook his head slightly.

"Ouch, little man. Is that all you got?"

Kid Flash zipped forward, a red and yellow blur to all watching and kicked Kazmir in the mid section sending him flying six feet backward onto his ass.

"I've got more than you could ever handle, no matter how many roids you do," said Kid Flash and he took up a martial arts stance motioning Kazmir to come forward with just the fingers of one hand. "Always wanted to do that," he muttered quietly to himself.

A furious Kazmir advanced but may as well have hit a force field four feet out from where Kid Flash stood. Every time he tried to move forward a red and yellow blur would result and it would end in Kid Flash punching Kazmir or kicking him back onto his ass. Finally, Kid Flash didn't wait for Kazmir to get up but advanced on him as he was just getting to his feet and there was a blur of red and yellow punching. Kazmir went jelly legged and slumped to the pavement.

"Tell the other guys in your cell block that you got your ass kicked by a little boy," Kid Flash leaned in and whispered to him.

The other cops all rushed in now and cuffed and hauled off Kazmir. Kid Flash got a few pats on the back and he also noticed that nearly every cop cast a glance toward him at some point, a glance that would have had a thought balloon along the lines of "Shit. The kid really is tough."

This incident went a long way toward his getting respect from the JCPD. As the year had gone on, Wally had tried to talk with Uncle Barry about this and other troubles he was having but Uncle Barry just didn't seem to understand. Wally was hardly inclined to criticize people along those lines but Uncle Barry was such an incredible nerd sometimes it was amazing. He never seemed to get that Wally didn't want to let himself be humiliated in order to preserve his secret identity. It was weird that it just didn't register with him. Maybe part of what annoyed Wally about this insensitivity was following Uncle Barry's suggestions.

One time, Uncle Barry was quizzing him to see if anyone seemed to even entertain the possibility that he, Wally West, might be Kid Flash. Your mom? Ha! No way. Your father? Are you kidding? Your teachers? He got all the way down past the people whose lawns he mowed to his sister's friends. Wally replied that he was in the clear with everyone. No one did. He mentioned, of hand, how his sister had laughed at one of her friends who noted how his hair was similar to Kid Flash's.

Uncle Barry stared.

Wally sighed. No!

Uncle Barry stared.

Wally's shoulders, almost his whole body drooped. He cast one last pleading glance at Uncle Barry. Come on! Don't make me . . !

Uncle Barry gave him an airtight look back. No maybes. No qualifiers. You have to.

Wally limply nodded.

The next time his sister had that friend over, Wally got in an argument with his sister, protesting her calling him a nerd and finished by ostentatiously spinning around after his last words to her. He took one step and promptly tripped on the edge of the living room carpet, going flying, and fell to the floor in such a way that he planted his face in the big piece of custard pie that he was carrying. His sister and her friends fell on the floor laughing at him. They totally missed him mumbling, "Happy, Uncle Barry?"

Uncle Barry didn't seem to appreciate how much Wally hated setting himself up to be laughed at. Aunt Iris understood. Even though she was a woman, Aunt Iris seemed to understand everything.

But sometimes she wasn't available. She was often away somewhere investigating something for a story she was writing. Wally would be worked up over something, cops whose asses he could kick in a fraction of a second disrespecting him or dumb media people or things at school. He would call her number and get her voice telling him he'd reached 555-5309 and a beep. He'd feel of wave of disappointment and then have to make a huge effort to keep that out of his voice while leaving a message. "Hi, Aunt Iris. Just me . . Wally. Um . . give me a call when you can."

Once, after not reaching her, he talked everything through with Chan. Oh, Chan wasn't there. And he didn't call him. Wally couldn't bear to talk to his former best friend now that Chan was living in Star City with his family. No, he talked to imaginary Chan, parallel universe Chan. Chan who had stayed in Jump City, of course stayed best friends with Wally, and to whom Wally had inevitably revealed his secret identity. Chan would have guessed it anyway. Wally was sure of that.

He commiserated with Chan in his bedroom, still wearing his Kid Flash suit.

"Hey, listen to how well Flash and J'onn J'onnz improved the sound on the scanner pickup." He motioned for Chan to lean in close. He imagined Chan leaning over the back of his shoulders to put his ear right next to his right ear wing. He pressed on it and you could hear the Jump City Police dispatcher. Only the sound was perfect, no hiss, static or distortion.

_Wow, dude. Much better than before. _

" . . yeah, so anyways, today, this fat cop had the nerve to snicker at me!" He looked to his left and imagined Chan shaking his head in sympathy.

_Just like that one last week?_

" . . yeah, just like that one last week. Some guy who just transfered to JCPD from Star City."

_Maybe he was only snickering at the suit._

Wally shook his head. "He made some stupid remark about his biceps being bigger than my waist. So I said 'yeah, so are your jowls' But, so what if he had been? I have to wear the suit. You know that."

_Look, you're my buddy and all . . . and you're in really rad shape but . . damn, the way it shows your buns and your equipment!_

Wally shrugged. "What can I do? I have to wear it. Besides, it doesn't bother me nearly as much as it used to, even the-the dance belt thing," he said looking down at said undergarment.

_Chan just shook his head and chuckled at Wally wearing a suit like that. He could never quite get used to it._

Wally grinned just imagining Chan's smile. He pantomimed a mild punch back at Chan after Chan had punched his shoulder. Sigh. Talking to Chan used to be so easy!

"You'd be like this, too, if you'd only gone to Keystone City with me that time. And you can't wear a suit like this unless you've been . . speedsterized like I was."

_It obviously made a difference in you, too. You weren't like . . that before. Your body is . . OFF DA CHAIN!_

Wally chuckled. He could just hear Chan shouting, "Your body is OFF DA CHAIN!" He laughed out loud now.

It was an in joke between Wally and Chan about how Aaron, Jeff and Stevie, but especially Stevie would use rap or ghetto catch phrases to try to sound cool. Wally and Chan would repeat the same phrases only even more bombastically. Stevie would think they were going along with him but it was about making fun of Stevie as much as anything else.

So, at one point, somehow, the phrase that Stevie had latched onto was "Off Da Chain!" He used it almost universally. Something could be good or exceptional or crazy or have practically any attribute or he could just be bored and Stevie would let out this slightly whispered assessment, "That shit is off da chain!". So, Wally and Chan took to not just whispering it but shouting it at the top of their lungs as they jumped up with both hands raised. "OFF DA CHAIN!" And Chan then modified it to apply to anything having to do with him personally, "OFF DA CHAN!" He and Wally could barely avoid bursting into giggles. And then some of the time, Stevie would correct them, as if he were some sort of ghetto authority, pudgy pasty faced Stevie living with his white bread family in their gadgetastic McMansion in a rich neighborhood of Jump City.

"Dude, dude. You have to say 'Chain'."

"But I'm Chan."

"He's right, Stevie. He's Chan."

"That –sigh- it doesn't matter, West! That's not how it goes. It's'Chain' not 'Chan'."

"But it sounds cool when he does it that way."

"I'm Chan."

"He's got you there, Stevie. He is Chan."

In short order they would get Stevie to fume and walk away. "Forget it, West! You and Chan are hopeless. I don't know why I bother to try to introduce you to a little bit of cool so that you don't seem like such hopeless nerds."

He'd correct Wally and Chan about their use of that and other ghetto slang and Wally and Chan would pretend to have no idea about what he was saying. They'd intentionally say things wrong just to annoy him. Chan once called it going into deep nerd cover. And Stevie would buy it every time. Wally and Chan would fall over themselves laughing as soon as they were away from Stevie.

"And you could've been OFF DA CHAN!"

Wally smiled and sighed. If only.

If only Chan had been speedsterized, too, instead of staying Chan and then having to move to Star City. He felt his eyes almost watering and quickly changed out of his Kid Flash suit into his civilian clothes. He flopped down on his bed. On the one hand it felt sort of better to have even a pretend conversation about this stuff with his best friend. On the other, this burst of thinking about his best friend made him ache for his companionship.

But Chan was in Star City now. Even though he was a Flash and could run to Star City the way other boys could run down the street, it didn't change things. Being best friends wasn't about being able to do a skype call once a week or for him to zip down to Star City now and then. It was about always being side by side. It was about being able to say anything and not having to say a damn thing. He and Chan spent so many hours sitting next to each other reading books or flopped across Chan's bed doing homework and not saying a word. They didn't need to and they had all the time in the world to say something. Until they didn't.

Wally had tried to avoid thinking about Chan since he'd moved. He knew it would feel terrible like this. And he somehow sensed that he had no idea how to make it feel any better if he did start thinking about Chan. His friendships with Aaron, Jeff and Stevie weren't developing into anything more. Hell, they were falling apart with his unexplained departures and failures to show up where he'd said he would. And it wasn't as thought he was making connections to other kids at school. He was only getting more and more isolated.

He lay there on his bed for two hours just thinking about his best friend. He, a speedster, didn't even get up to eat! The most shocking thing about what finally jarred him out of this deep emotional rut was that it was Uncle Barry who did it.

ZapZapZap!

ZapZapZap!

"Ow."

Wally looked at his finger. His ring was shocking him but the shocks were coming three at a time. That wasn't a call from the Jump City Police Department. That was two zaps at a time. This was a call from Flash. A part of him welcomed the distraction even as he realized it might mean that Flash was in real trouble.

ZapZapZap!

In between blinks he had his civilian clothes off and his Kid Flash uniform back on. Before he blinked again, he was sprinting along the interstate leading east from Jump City and heading to Keystone to meet Flash. As he neared the City he pressed on his right earwing and listened in to the police scanner frequency but there was nothing going on, crime-wise, in Keystone. But maybe Flash was fighting a super villain and needed his help. He sped past the police building where Uncle Barry worked and a moment later Flash was running alongside him and motioning for him to pull over into the parking lot of a closed down strip mall.

"Are you okay?!"

"I'm fine, Kid Flash. I just wasn't sure how to discuss something with you over the phone. What with all the stories of excessive surveillance that you read, I didn't want to compromise our identities or three more."

"Huh? Three more? What's this about?"

"Well it occurred to me and to Green Arrow and Black Canary that it would be a good thing for you and Speedy to meet."

Flash paused to see how he took that and was pleased at the way his protege's face suddenly brightened.

"So, this weekend, Green Arrow and Black Canary and I are going to the Justice League's satellite, the Watchtower and we thought-"

"I can go up in the Watchtower?!"

Flash nodded. "Yup. And we thought it might be a good thing for you and Speedy to meet and you two could tour the place and stay over a couple nights."

"Oh my . . ! Wow! That'dbegreatFlash!Ohboy!TheWatchtower!IactuallygettogoupintheWatch tower!There'slikeafreakingtonoftechupthe rethatdoesn'texistanywhereelseonearthand Igettoseeit!IgettogoonaJusticeLeaguefaci lity!"

"Um . . . yeah."

"Sorry," chuckled Kid Flash and he slapped his palm to his forehead. "I accidentally speed talked."

"Can you spend next weekend up there?"

Kid Flash nodded at super speed. He wanted to laugh. His parents wouldn't even notice he was gone.

"How 'bout, um," he paused to try to achieve some simulation of nonchalance, "isthereanychanceBatGirlorWon derGirlmightbethere?"

Flash smiled and Kid Flash hung his head at totally blowing it by slipping into speed talking again.

"I'm not sure what other young heroes might be there. But, Bat Girl and Wonder Girl might be there. Or maybe Robin."

Kid Flash rolled his eyes. Robin! Little midget fascist in elf shoes.

"So, meet me at 6 p.m. on Friday at the intersection next to police headquarters in Keystone City. Mr. Terrific'll beam us up and we'll go from there. Okay?"

Kid Flash nodded excitedly.


	14. Kid Flash Meets Speedy -- Part I

It was nearly 6 o'clock on Friday, the time that Wally West was supposed to be traveling up to the Justice League's satellite headquarters, the Watchtower, as Kid Flash. Only, he wasn't traveling anywhere bent over his mother's knee the way he was.

Sounds like the cracks of four gunshots rang out through his parents' small bedroom.

Whack!Whack!Whack!Whack!

"This _cannot_ be happening!" Wally mumbled through gritted teeth, his lips nearly touching the carpet of his parents' bedroom, bent over his mother's knee as he was.

Whack!Whack!Whack!Whack!

I'm a fricking superhero! Superheroes do not get spanked! He felt this with complete conviction but these thoughts had no effect on his mother. She continued to do so.

Whack!Whack!Whack!Whack!

My butt! Dammit! This is starting to really hurt! Out of the corner of his eye he could see the alarm clock on the nightstand. It was already six o'clock. This can-not be happening!

But it was happening. He was going to be late getting to the Watchtower because he was bent over his mother's knee getting a spanking.

Whack!Whack!Whack!Whack!

For several minutes, the whole thing had been a slow motion train wreck. He realized now that his sister had set him up, which only made this worse.

Whack!Whack!Whack!Whack!

She told him that the new box of Nilla Wafers was fair game. He'd been unable to resist Nilla Wafers before being speedsterized. Now, he'd eat three boxes at a time, if they'd let him. His sister told him they were fair game. Dammit! She said . . !

Whack!Whack!Whack!Whack!

His mother wouldn't listen. His sister pretended she'd told him the opposite. No matter what he said, no matter how he protested, his mother didn't believe him. She took his sister's word.

Whack!Whack!Whack!Whack!

He tried to sidestep the whole thing, telling his mother that he had to go. He was supposed to be at um . . Aaron's house at six. She didn't care. She almost took offense that he was trying to get out of punishment.

Whack!Whack!Whack!Whack!

She grabbed his wrist and started toward the stairs up to her room. He couldn't believe this was happening today of all days, now of all times!

Whack!Whack!Whack!Whack!

He hadn't been spanked for months and months. Maybe it was a year now. He figured his mother had realized that he was too old for that. He protested on the way up the stairs. "Mom! I'm . . I'm . . almost 13 now. This is ridiculous." Behind him, he could hear his sister giggling with delight at the immediate prospect.

Whack!Whack!Whack!Whack!

And then they were in the bedroom and he watched his mother pick the ridiculous oversized hairbrush off the dresser, one she never even used except for this. His mind raced. There had to be a way out of this that didn't compromise his secret identity. But he ran through ideas in his head and couldn't come up with anything. So Wally West, aka Kid Flash, found himself getting bent over his mother's knee and his pants pulled down before being forced to absorb a series of swats as hard as his mother could manage with the supersized hair brush.

Whack!Whack!Whack!Whack!

He was furious at the unfairness and ridiculousness of it all. So, no matter how much it was starting to hurt, he refused to cry or yelp or say anything. He only grunted slightly with each wallop he absorbed. They came in series of four at a time. That was just how his mother did it. But denying his mother any satisfaction was having the opposite of the intended effect. If anything, she was hitting him harder.

Whack!Whack!Whack!Whack!

She paused and to his mother's shock, her boy scientist son rose up off her knee faster than she thought he could. He pulled up the back of his pants and faced her angrily.

"I'm . . . ," he paused, breathing heavily.

He almost said it to let her know how incredibly much she underestimated him, how much they all did. But instead of divulging out of anger, he withheld out of anger. You don't deserve to know!

". . I'm almost 13 now. I'm not gonna put up with this any more."

His mother, still seated on the edge of the bed, was momentarily shocked then sputtered, "You'll . . you'll do what we tell you to!"

"I already do! I do my chores. I make my own money mowing lawns. I get good grades in school. I do everything I'm supposed to! I don't deserve this," he said gesturing at the giant hairbrush still in her hand. "I don't know why I'm supposed to always get crapped on but I'm not taking this part of it," he gestured at the hairbrush again, "Not any more."

With that he marched out the room, past his sister watching it all from the top of the stairs and down to the front door. He stopped to rub his sore ass by the door and to announce, "I'm going over to Aaron's house. I'll be back Sunday night."

20 seconds later he had changed into his Kid Flash uniform, quite happy that it was red from the waist down, and sped to where Flash was waiting outside the courthouse building in Keystone City. Flash gave him a look of disappointment, one eyebrow raised.

"You're two minutes late. Mr. Terrific already called down from the Watchtower wondering where you are."

Kid Flash gave a flustered sigh. "It . . it was a-a family thing. I . . couldn't get out of it . . my . . my sister and my crazy mother," he finished with a shake of his head. The incongruity of having to deal with . . that . . he rubbed his buns through his Kid Flash uniform . . when I'm about to go up to the watchtower! He shook his head.

"Are you okay? Are you ready for this?"

Kid Flash nodded.

Flash pressed on his right earwing a series of times rapidly. From right next to his mentor, Kid Flash heard a weird high pitched tone and then another voice.

"Mr. Terrific, Watchtower comm center."

"T, it's me, Flash."

"Is your boy there now?"

"He's one step to my right and ready to go."

". . yup. Got a . . lock on him, too. Just hold on a second while the teleporter does the usual first time scan of the newby."

Flash leaned down slightly toward Kid Flash. "They've teleported me up there a bunch of times. But before a guy gets beamed up for the first time they have to do a scan of your body to make sure there aren't any . . unexpected anomalies."

"Like my . . " he looked down at his lower abs where everything he digested got sent to another dimension.

"Oh, that's not that unusual. It's the Justice League. Now, get ready. You'll feel a tingle and then it's like being in a white tunnel and then you'll be up in the transporter room."

"Okay, your boy's clean. Come on up!" Kid Flash heard that same voice saying in Flash's right earwing. The next second his whole body started to tingle, kind of pleasantly, actually. And then it was like everything he saw was a computer screen and individual pixels were being deleted from the image and replaced with spots of white till more and more the screen was just plain white and then finally all white. This took just a fraction of a second but it seemed longer to a speedster. Then the white all around him became almost blinding. And suddenly everything in his vision was a normal white again. And then it was the reverse; it was like individual pixels were showing up again, little pieces of the puzzle picture replacing the white and suddenly, he could see that he was in the stainless steel and black marble interior of the Watchtower teleportation room.

He lingered on the silver circle where he'd somehow "landed", turning his head this way and that as though he had to take it all in right away. "Wow," he gushed. "So, this is a geosynchronous orbit, right?"

Flash nodded and ushered him toward a doorway at the far end of the room. Kid Flash shuffled alongside, still awed. He patted his abs checking that he felt normal. "Then I-I just got moved 22,236 miles up into the sky and I didn't even feel a push or pull or like I was being lifted. I-I was just . . there and-and now I'm here. I . . w-wow!"

Flash introduced him to Mr. Terrific and for the next 15 minutes, Kid Flash indulged all his science obsessions. Mr. Terrific and Flash were complete nerds and both thought it was perfectly natural for a boy to be fascinated by the various aspects of the Watchtower, the teleporting system, the communications system, the power plant, the synthetic gravity system, the atmospheric controls . . everything!

He asked dozens of questions and Mr. Terrific and Flash answered them all. They were helped by J'onn J'onnz, who wandered by and flashed a rare smile of enjoyment at the young speedster's high speed curiosity.

Finally, Kid Flash felt a tap on his shoulder as Mr. Terrific was explaining how some of the controls for the teleporter worked.

"This one here locks in the molecular matrix of the target and sets-"

"Huh?" He was taken totally by surprise. Did something else besides this scientific display exist?

He finally turned to that side to see Flash with a raised eyebrow.

"We've gotta go, Kid Flash. I'm supposed to meet Green Arrow."

Kid Flash gave a hurried hand shake thank you to Mr. Terrific and zipped after Flash. Flash was walking at a brisk but normal pace through the mostly white and stainless steel halls of the Watchtower. Every few seconds, Kid Flash would point to something, identify it and slow down hoping that Flash would stop and let him examine it more closely. But Flash just kept going.

"Flash! One of the liquid fluroride thorium reactor rooms. Please, Flash . . can we . . . "

"Flash! The holographic projection entertainment room you told me about! Let's . . . "

"Flash! The magnetized plasma shield generator . . Fla-ash?!

Finally, the boy speedster gave a resigned sigh and just walked alongside his mentor. But he couldn't remain silent for long.

"Where are we going?"

"To the cafeteria to meet Green Arrow, Black Canary and Speedy."

Kid Flash's mind raced. A Justice League cafeteria! So cool. And Green Arrow, Black Canary, one hot lady, and Speedy.

His thoughts were mostly of Speedy and what this might mean. A superhero friend, a superhero pal. A buddy I won't have to lie and hide this side of myself from. Someone I can compare notes with, someone who I can talk to about all of this. Everything won't be so lonely. A superhero best friend.

Kid Flash's head filled with a hazy glow at the prospect. He hadn't had a best friend, nor much of a friend at all since Chan and his family had moved away to Star City, since right after he became Kid Flash. Just being in the Watchtower felt like he was moving beyond his unsatisfying Wally West life. Having a superhero best friend would be the next big step into his new life.

Seeing his reflection in one of the doors to the cafeteria he had a moment's feeling of insecurity about how incredibly tight his uniform was but dismissed this worry considering that everyone here was wearing spandex or a cape or something else ridiculously flamboyant. So, you can see the exact outline of every muscle in my body, so what?

He made himself walk with good posture, proud of himself, not insecure at all, uh uh, not him. As they entered the almost illogically large cafeteria with tables and chairs casually a bit askew, Kid Flash could see Green Lantern and Hawkman and Hawkgirl talking and eating at one nearby table. A few past them Plastic Man and Elongated Man were laughing. At another, Captain Marvel and Wildcat were discussing something. There were pairs and groups of three or four heroes dotted around the room. In one far corner, Batman sat alone. Flash led Kid Flash to one side of the room where they picked up trays and started walking past all the food displays.

"You take as much as you want and anything you want," said Flash. Kid Flash beamed. This was a speedster's dream come true. He piled his tray high with turkey, roast beef, lasagna, shrimp, vegetables and mashed potatoes with two pieces of chocolate cake for dessert and a 32 ounce 7up to wash it all down. Screw you, Mayor Bloomberg, I'm a Flash! The food made a pyramid on his tray that he had to be careful to balance so that nothing fell off. Flash's tray looked nearly as gluttonous.

Flash led his protege over to the other side of the cafeteria where, at a table just past Captain Marvel and Wildcat, there were Black Canary and Speedy facing him and Green Arrow with his back to the speedsters as they approached. Black Canary stood up smiling.

"Flash! Oh, my gosh, and you must be Kid Flash!"

Kid Flash nodded, his mouth unfortunately already full of turkey meat. He frantically chewed and swallowed. "Yes, ma'am."

She gestured for Flash and Kid Flash to take two of the empty seats at their table. After the speedsters had put down their trays she introduced them both to Speedy. Flash shook his hands first and then Kid Flash.

He could see that the teen archer was taller than him by a few inches. He guessed that he was a year or so older, too. He wore an all red uniform that, while maybe spandex, was nowhere near as tight as a Flash suit. His bow and quiver full of arrows rested on the back of his chair. He seemed to be looking Kid Flash over just as much as Kid Flash was doing likewise and finally his face broke into a big smirk. Or maybe that was a bigger smirk because soon enough Kid Flash came to the conclusion that Speedy was always smirking at something.

"Amazing place, huh?" said Kid Flash to the teen archer as he dug in to his tray of food.

"It works."

"I was showing Kid Flash some of the Watchtower's tech," explained Flash to Speedy as well as his guardians. "He was bombarding me and Mr. Terrific with questions about the teleporting system and the communications frequencies we have for clear transmission to anywhere on earth and the magnetic plasma shields. Great stuff for a boy."

Kid Flash saw, out of the corner of his eye that both Speedy and Green Arrow made faces.

"Flashes," muttered Green Arrow.

"Ollie!" Black Canary seemed to be warning him and he didn't say anything more.

Kid Flash kept feverishly shoveling in his food. It was such a relief to be free of any need to pretend to eat like any other boy and to not have to worry about the supply of food. The young speedster finished the last of his entrees and vegetables and let out a huge burp.

"Excuse me."

Speedy chuckled. "How are you not a giant fat ass eating like that?"

Kid Flash shrugged and swallowed a gulp of 7up. "Fast metabolism."

Flash glanced at the clock on one wall of the cafeteria and abruptly stood up. He extended a hand to Speedy. "Well, it's nice to meet you, son, but your mom and dad and I have to go now. Our mission requires that we leave in just a few minutes. You and Kid Flash can hang out together for the next couple days and get to know each other. We might be back from Rigell 7 later tonight or we might be gone all the way through till Sunday. We'll have to see how things go."

Speedy shrugged. Yeah, sure, whatever.

Green Arrow shook Kid Flash's hand and Black Canary gave him a pat on the head and a hug as she went past. Seconds later, they were gone.

Kid Flash took a last gulp of his 7up and let out a thunderous burp. Speedy shook his head and muttered, "Come on." Kid Flash followed him in busing their table, getting their mentors' trays taken care of, too.

"Where to from here?" asked Kid Flash following Speedy out of the cafeteria out into the hallway.

"Our room," Speedy tossed over his shoulder.

They went down one hallway, turned right, went down another, up a set of stairs, down another long hallway and turned left down yet another hallway near the end of which they stopped. Speedy took off his glove and was about to press his hand onto the black glass pad at waist height outside the door but stopped and gestured to Kid Flash. "You do it."

Kid Flash took off his right glove and pressed his hand to the dark square. A high pitched 'PING' sounded, and a mechanical female voice intoned "Kid . . Flash" then the door opened outward toward them. Kid Flash was going to ask when his hand print had gotten into the system then realized that the teleporter had taken his body apart and put it back together 22,000 miles away so it could probably manage to get his prints.

Inside, the room was fairly large. There were actually four beds in the mostly white room. They were sort of an odd size, wider than twin beds and almost two feet longer than normal beds. Maybe that was what you had to have with superhero sized people staying over. The furnishings were sort of sci fi Ikea, completely modern but not luxurious. Each bed had a small desk and a set of shelves next to it as well as a small dresser. There was one large television in the room. It faced the bed that Speedy sauntered over to and flopped down on.

"Can I take any of the others?"

Speedy shrugged indifference. "Sure."

Kid Flash walked over and flopped down on the one nearest to Speedy's, the only other one that would see much on the room's television. An awkward silence began that Kid Flash quickly broke.

"So, have you been here before?"

"Three times before this."

"This is my first time."

Another awkward silence loomed. Kid Flash felt anxious. He couldn't remember ever being so anxious to make friends. Even when he'd first moved to Jump City from Blue Valley and kids had all made fun of him for his orange hair and for being a nerd. He'd just endured it and then struck up a great friendship with Chan and lesser friendships with Aaron, Jeff and Stevie. Now, Chan lived in a different city and things were deteriorating with the other guys. He desperately wanted to be good friends with Speedy but at the same time he knew that if he acted desperate that it would never happen.

"Um, so, have you met any other young heroes?"

"Yeah, I met Aqualad for one."

Kid Flash nodded. "He seems like a cool guy."

Speedy made a bit of a face. "The pretty boy prince of Atlantis."

"I-I heard him talk. There was a clip on youtube. He spoke in a very . . sophisticated way."

"Yeah, he's mister grammar and mister politeness."

"You said 'for one'. Have you met any others?"

"Robin."

Kid Flash rolled his eyes. The little elf shoed fascist.

Speedy laughed at the speedster's expression. "I totally agree. I was friendly toward him but he gave me all this batitude. Total wall of frost."

"Ahaha!" Kid Flash laughed out loud. Batitude. "How 'bout, um," Kid Flash started quietly leaning forward on the edge of his bed. "Wonder Girl and Bat Girl. Did you ever meet them?"

"You think they're hot?"

Kid Flash stood up now but only grinned in response.

"Well, why would they ever go out with you when they could go out with me or total pretty boys like Aqualad or Captain Marvel Junior."

"I-I don't know. Maybe they'd like me."

"First, you'd have to convince 'em that you're not gay which might be tough with that suit," Speedy chuckled. Kid Flash sighed. Made fun of even in a crowd where everyone's wearing spandex.

"I'm a Flash," he protested.

"Well, if you wear a suit that tight, long enough, it'll make you gay."

"Hey!"

"I mean, I felt a little embarrassed about my uniform," Speedy said, tapping at his utility belt. "I mean . . red spandex. But, haha, compared to you I'm understated and modest. That stuff, whatever it is, is like spandex squared. I didn't think anything could fit that tight."

"Flashes have to wear uniforms this tight. It's not something I just felt like wearing."

"Maybe so, but it's one thing for Flash to wear a suit like that. He's like six one and impressive. You must be the smallest hero in here, unless Robin or Atom's in the Watchtower, but that freaking suit is tighter than anyone else's."

Kid Flash fumed.

"What do you wear under a suit like that?" Speedy asked, pointing below Kid Flash's waist. "Oh shit, you're wearing a freaking dance belt aren't you?"

"Yeah," admitted Kid Flash guessing this might be the quickest way to get past this.

Speedy rocked back and forth laughing and finished this outburst with a clap of his hands. "Oh my god. A suit that tight and ballet underwear. How will you ever explain that to Wonder Girl or Batgirl?"

"Well I didn't figure on leading off with that. Hi, I'm Kid Flash and I wear a dance belt under this suit."

"It's a unitard, too, isn't it?"

Kid Flash shrugged. "Yeah. So?"

"Unitards are way more gay than two pieces," snickered Speedy.

"You seem to be some kind of authority on what's 'gay' and what's not. How did you come to be such an authority?"

"Ooooo! Little dude fires back," laughed Speedy standing up and then advancing to where Kid Flash stood and patting him on the shoulder. "Don't get your unitard all in a bunch. Anybody can see you're in impossibly good shape. I just don't think Wonder Girl or Batgirl would ever consider you if Aqualad or Captain Marvel Junior were around. They're the best looking dudes."

Kid Flash only shrugged. How would you determine such a thing? Maybe they were. Maybe they weren't. No matter what he still wanted to meet Wonder Girl and Batgirl.

"You have any idea whether Wonder Girl or Batgirl might come up to the Watchtower this weekend?"

"What am I, their secretary? I don't know. But I heard Batgirl was here last weekend so I doubt that she'll be up here again, so soon. She wouldn't want you, anyway. You're barely taller than Robin. Maybe you should try to hook up with a civilian or a villain girl," chuckled Speedy as he flopped back down on his bed and pulled a smart phone out of his utility belt.

"A villain girl?!" Kid Flash shook his head dismissively.

Speedy chuckled at him. "Like you should be turning away anyone who doesn't fall down laughing at that uniform."

Another awkward silence filled the room.

"Hey, you can get reception up here?" asked Kid Flash nodding toward Speedy and his smart phone then reaching for the remote control for the room's tv.

Speedy spoke with a shake of his head while looking down at his phone's screen. "What, you think they can teleport your ass up here but they can't bounce a few measly microwaves off to another satellite?"

Kid Flash only shrugged, just happy that open conflict had been avoided. He pressed the power button on the remote but nothing happened.

Huh?

He tried another hundred times. Still nothing.

Hmmph.

Then he noticed a small black glass square at the bottom of the control labeled "THUMB PRINT". Oh. He took off his right glove and placed his thumb on it. That same robotic woman's voice as at the door pronounced, "Kid . . Flash". Now, he pressed the power button and the tv turned on. But this wasn't just any tv. This tv seemed to have every channel on earth. There were more than a thousand with the stations from different nations all in bunches together. One through 500 were from the U.S. 501 through 550 were from Japan and so on. He picked a number at random. 537. The screen came alive with a newscast that the look of the news anchors, the caption text and the skyline in the background gave away as Tokyo. He tried another, 1241. Now, the screen showed a bullfight with sounds of a cheering crowd and a frantic spanish announcer's voice bellowing at a pace that would do an auctioneer proud in response to a matador waving a cape in front of a bull charging hopelessly.

Hmmph. Kid Flash remembered seeing a promo at Stevie's house about a notorious movie with all these naked girls about to premiere on one of the U.S. pay movie channels. Hmmm. He navigated down to the american tv offerings and found his way to that channel but, to his chagrin, the 70 inch screen first went blue then displayed a message in huge letters. "CHANNEL BLOCKED. NOT AGE APPROPRIATE FOR VIEWER - KID FLASH"

"Aw, come on!" he moaned.

"Yeah, I tried that, too, my first time," snickered Speedy from the bed behind him to one side before going back to his smart phone and flicking messages away rapid fire. "We'd have to get one of the over 21's or at least over 17's to thumb the control for us. Good luck with the crowd we've got here. Maybe Firestorm, Plastic Man or Wildcat would do it for us. None of the rest."

Speedy finished with his phone, stowing it in his utility belt as he stood up and gestured to Kid Flash to follow him out the door. "Come on, let's go to the holodeck."

Kid Flash wasn't sure what Speedy had in mind but he followed anyway. It turned out that the holodeck was an almost illogically large high ceilinged room that could be programmed to be any sort of setting, warehouse, an empty floor of an office building, a horse riding ring, a deserted city street etc. There were dozens more. Kid Flash saw Speedy flicking past them on the control screen by the door. Speedy clicked for "empty floor of an office building" on the one foot square little screen set waist on the wall. All of a sudden, everything around them was an office. Desks, chairs, cubicles, phones, keyboards, monitors, bulletin boards covered with postits. It was exact and the detail stunned Kid Flash. He stared open mouthed. He wandered over to Speedy at the control console.

"How's it do that?" he half gasped.

Speedy shrugged. "I don't know. Okay, let's pick a reason why we're fighting. Let's see what random comes up with," said the teen archer clicking for that choice on the touch screen.

"Huh?" asked the boy speedster only vaguely aware of what the teen archer had said. "How . . how does it do this? This-this is amazing! Do you understand how amazing this is?!" asked an excited Kid Flash pressing one red gloved hand to the office cubicle divider a foot away from him that hadn't been there 10 seconds ago and couldn't possibly be there now but somehow was. It had physical mass and shape. Kid Flash gawked at it.

He scanned the room in all directions looking for some sort of source of these effects but the room was just an absolutely run of the mill office.

"You have to explain the science of this to me!" he demanded.

"I don't know how the freaking molecules came together fer chrissakes. I just know that they do."

"How can you just accept this like nothing?" asked an incredulous Kid Flash gesturing with one arm at the office that was suddenly there.

"Easy. I'm not a super nerd Flash."

"What?"

"Everybody knows that's how your group is."

Kid Flash squinted quizzically. "My group?"

"Yeah," said Speedy matter of factly. "Your group, Flashes, are nerds. Supers are stiffs. Bats are psycho assholes. Arrows are cool. Aquas are sort of snobs. Marvels are dumb jocks. Lanterns are-"

"Wait. So . . . you've got everybody pegged and you just happen to have assigned to yourself that you're cool?"

Speedy smirked. "What'd you want me to do, lie? Besides, that's not just me. That's how everybody in the league thinks. Flash is like the biggest nerd in the universe and you're his nerd understudy."

"Oh really? . . . and, uh, . . does Superman know you think he's a stiff?"

Speedy chuckled. "Have you met him?

Kid Flash fumed silently for a moment.

Speedy continued. "That's why you have the villains you have. Everybody gets villains like themselves. You and Flash have all these villains, Captain Cold, Heatwave, Weather Wizard, Mirror Master who seem to have taken their junior high science projects and just kept upgrading 'em till they had something they can rob a bank with."

"Hey! We have tougher villains than anyone. Gorilla Grodd! . . . Abra Kadabra! That guy can do practically anything!

"Yeah, yeah, yeah. But all he wants is to be applauded. Then you have all those really powerful stiffs superman fights like Brainiac 5. And look at Batman's villains a psychotic bunch of assholes. Everybody gets villains like them. That's just how it goes. It's like a law of nature."

Kid Flash fumed some more. He didn't want to admit it but what Speedy was saying had a lot of truth to it. The Flash villains did tend strongly toward science nuts.

"You can see I'm right, can't you?" said Speedy seeing the change of expression away from indignation on the speedster's face. "Allright, enough about what a nerd you are. Let's do this. What do you say, ten minute time limit?"

Kid Flash shrugged. "What are we doing, anyway?"

"A fight, a practice fight."

"What?!" Kid Flash made a face. "I can't fight you. I have a power. I'd kick your ass."

"oooo pretty confident. Well, I wasn't intending for you to use your . . 'power' and," he set aside his bow and his quiver full of arrows. "I'm not going to use my weapons. Just you against me with no super speed and no arrows."

Kid Flash sighed in displeasure. "That's good for you. You're, what, five eight and change to my five four and something like a hundred thirty to my one oh two."

"Do you wanna get better at fighting or not?"

Kid Flash nodded.

"Then ya gotta fight and sometimes the other guy's bigger. Besides, I wouldn't have that much weight advantage on you if you had even a drop of fat. Christ, you're a little freak. No powers, promise?"

Kid Flash nodded. Speedy read off the justification from the screen that the computer had come up with. It was a misunderstanding said the computer. Each hero boy thought the other had been tricked by a crime kingpin to be after the wrong guy. The fight started with Speedy rushing at Kid Flash and half shoving, half throwing him over the top of some office cubicle dividers. For the first 30 seconds or so, Kid Flash was startled by the simple violence of it. He didn't fight like this. He was smaller than everyone. Zoom in and punch, run off. Zoom in and punch, run off. That was how he fought. This was like a barroom brawl.

He really tried to not use super speed but where was the dividing line? He didn't use super speed in swinging at Speedy or dodging him or moving. But if you get thrown over an office cubicle wall onto a desk, how do you not stick your hand out to push the monitor away so that the back of your neck doesn't come down on it?

After just a little bit of it, he found, to his surprise, that he was actually kind of enjoying all the chaotic destruction as he and Speedy went smashing into a water cooler, sent desks flying and flipped over large copying machines. He knew he was doing a better job of fighting by the end of the 10 minutes. At first, Speedy had simply overpowered him, throwing him and bull rushing him. But every time he adapted to Speedy, the teen archer seemed to come up with something new. He was impressed with the archer's skill.

At the 10 minute mark, a bell tone sounded in the room and suddenly all the office furnishings simply disappeared. Kid Flash wanted to take more note of this but Speedy had him from behind in a full nelson, his arms underneath Kid Flash's, to raise them and both his palms on the back of Kid Flash's head.

"Okay, what do you do now, speedster? How do you get out of this?"

Kid Flash grunted, struggling as much as he could without using his speed. "I don't know!"

Speedy's voice right behind him was contemptuous. "You mean you have a freaking super power and you're now sure how to get out of this hold?"

"What? I can use my speed? Okay."

Kid Flash vibrated his body so that the surface of his suit was red hot to the touch.

"Yeow!" Speedy let go and jumped back. "Jesus, you freaking burned me." As he did he grabbed at the back of Kid Flash's uniform and not only the waist of the uniform but the back of his dance belt. As he fell backward and Kid Flash started to zip in the other direction, his Kid Flash suit and dance belt both stretched four feet resulting in Kid Flash feeling a sudden, tremendous squeeze at his crotch. He started falling to his knees in distress just as Speedy let go.

SNAP!

His own uniform snapped back and hit him in the backside, hard. "Oh, man!" the speedster bemoaned this double discomfort rubbing himself front and back as the now safely unburnt archer chuckled.

But, the archer seemed to show him some respect now. And for most of the rest of that night, things were pretty smooth between the two redheads. They went back to their room stopping at one of the observation decks along the way. There was a huge window and a series of telescopes just waiting for anyone who came along to use if he or she wanted. Kid Flash pointed out some constellations to Speedy who knew more than Kid Flash expected. From there, they sauntered back to their room.

Kid Flash zipped to the cafeteria to get something for Speedy and much more for himself. Inside the cafeteria, he came upon Mr. Terrific getting Hawkgirl's electronic signature on some ipad looking device he had in his hand. He was explaining to her what it was. As he approached, Kid Flash heard something about a waiver to allow Thanagar to permit the League to do something or other.

Just as he got there, Hawkgirl, who stood about five foot nine, turned to the five foot four inch tall boy speedster and held out her mace, a more than two foot long battle weapon with an 18 inch long handle topped by a ball of steel eight inches across and studded with pyramidal spikes.

"Hold this for me," she said and she was so casual about it, offering it with a relaxed, one handed gesture that Kid Flash thought nothing of it. She turned back to sign electronically and a loud CLANK! reverberated off the cafeteria walls.

Kid Flash had been shocked to find that the damn thing weighed a hundred pounds. Though he frantically got his other hand onto the handle before the mace smashed into the black marble floor, he'd been too casual and didn't get into a position to have enough leverage to catch it. He was acutely conscious that the whole room was now looking at him, the skinny speedster bent over picking up the illogically heavy mace but there was nothing he could do now. He gathered it up, ending up cradling it like a baby as he stood next to Hawkgirl and marveling at how she took it from him with the same ease that most women her size might pick up a tv remote control.

He quickly got Speedy's snack and drink and his three snacks and drinks and zipped back to their room. Speedy was watching tv. As Kid Flash entered the darkened room and handed Speedy his snack and drink he could see that he somehow had the tv showing the channel that had denied him any viewing earlier. And it was playing that same nudity filled movie again.

Kid Flash gawked at his fellow hero redhead. "How did you do it? It should be refusing you the same way it refused me. You're not old enough to see this movie either, are you?"

"Shhhh!" Speedy cautioned and without looking away from the screen added, "If I told ya, I'd have to kill ya."

Kid Flash just sighed with a roll of his eyes and sat down next to Speedy on the archer's bed.

"You mind? The view's better here."

"Nah."

The boys' timing was perfect. The sexual odyssey of a fashion model, as the cable systems had summarized the movie, ended just minutes before there was a knock on the door. It turned out to be Black Canary, Green Arrow and Flash. Speedy was in the bathroom washing up but Kid Flash had already washed and taken off his uniform before jumping under the covers of his bed.

By the time Speedy emerged from the bathroom, he saw Flash bend over and give Kid Flash a hug about the shoulders and then a kiss goodnight on the forehead and then Black Canary do likewise. He brushed off any similar gestures toward him.

The minute their mentors were out the door, Speedy was back to mocking him. Hahaha that uniform! Gay gay gay! Little baby! Nerd Flash! Hahaha!

Kid Flash was perplexed. He was just thinking that they were getting along pretty well. Speedy had showed him some respect after the practice fight on the holodeck and they'd both enjoyed the movie. Now it was like they were back to square one. He finally pretended to have already fallen asleep to get Speedy to stop. The intensity of his sudden feeling of disappointment kept him awake a while longer. But maybe tomorrow would turn out better. It would be his first full day in the Watchtower.


End file.
